Baby’s Got the Blues by Carol Diggory Shields (review)

“You think babies have it easy?” begins this infant lament. It’s not true: “Sometimes being a baby/ is enough to make you cry.” The song traces the travails of babyhood from diaper issues (“Woke up this morning soggy,/ And that smell kept getting riper”) to coordination (“But every time I try to walk,/ I fall flat on my face”) to bedtime (“But I’m doing time behind these bars—/ Is it a crib or is it a jail?”). Fortunately, it all ends up in big loving snuggle that makes the baby “lose those baby blues.” The text follows the classic bluesy form, including a classic chorus (“B-A-B-Y, baby”), and it’s both funny and accurate in the details of infant frustration (some of which continue well beyond babyhood). The art gives viewers a hook in the form of baby’s older sister, who’s squirming away from the diaper change and zipping around with the freedom that the baby yearns for, thereby cleverly turning the book into a celebration of all the things post-baby kids can do that babies can’t. Figures in the ink, pencil, and digital illustrations have a combination of flow and rotundity that recalls Patricia Polacco at times, though the compositions are cleaner and more rhythmic and the linework crisper. Kids plagued by attention-grabbing new babies will find this a sly and lively reminder of their own superiority and their siblings’ lovability.