My Daddy is a Pretzel

My Daddy is a Pretzel
Written by: Baron Baptiste
Illustrated by: Sophie Fatus
Read Alone: Ages 4-9
Read Together: Ages 0-4
Hardcover; Jacketed, Full-color illustrations; 48pp;
8.75 x 11 inches

I can honestly say that this is one of my most favorite Barefoot Books ever! It combines what I would like to see for the perfect yoga book for children - thus, this makes it the PERFECT book to introduce children to yoga. This is also a great book for teachers who would like to introduce the different occupations or work that parents do!

The Introduction part of the book is very sincere. The author Baron Baptiste really showed how caring and how dedicated he is in bringing the right kind of discipline to his children as well to other children in the form of yoga. He made yoga a more enjoyable, and not frightful to most kids by interconnecting what profession a parent has. An example of which is the page below:

In this page, the mother is a gardener…on the other hand the dad is sometimes a tree. From this, the author builds on an occupation to a yoga position that is related to the occupation of being a gardener, thus the TREE position comes up.


In this page, it guides the reader from the first step to attaining this position to the final step. What I love about this YOGA pose page is that, throughout the book the author explains as to what this particular pose teaches us in our daily lives (i.e. Tree Pose teaches us to support ourselves) and then moves to the reason why we need to learn this lesson. For the Tree Pose, “so that we can reach high and remain stable, yet be flexible.”

I love the lessons/sayings from these YOGA pose pages. Here are some of the sayings I find very inspiring, even for young children:

1. “….and as with anything practice makes progress”

2. “Triangles have 3 sides and 3 angles - just as we have 3 aspects: mind, body and spirit”

3.”If we plow well, we can sow well, and then reap the rewards of what we have planted.”

and

4. from the Fish pose…”Don’t struggle upstream, jump in and just go with the flow, even in turbulent times.”


This book also presented a lot of diversity. The parents and the children that are illustrated are of different nationalities - and the diversity of work from a gardener, to a marine biologist, to a builder and then too a baker, it is just an amazing book! And of course, these poses can be enlarged if you are a teacher wanting to teach a step-by-step way of a certain pose.

- Alpha