When Grandma Gives You a Lemon Tree by Jamie L. B. Deenihan and Lorraine Rocha - Children's Day #1

When Grandma Gives You a Lemon Tree by Jamie Deenihan and Lorraine Rocha is the story of a little girl who gets an unexpected gift for her birthday. She has a list of 6 items she wants (mostly electronic, like a drone and a pair of headphones) but when the unnamed little girl is given a lemon tree by her grandmother, the narrator gives her some advice. She should act excited and thank her grandma.

Keep smiling until Grandma leaves (or falls asleep),

and do not harm your lemon tree. 

Don't:

Drop it off a bridge.

Tie it to your birthday balloons.

Play ding dong ditch the lemon tree. 

The narrator tells the little girl to keep her lemon tree warm, wait for it to grow (she is shown repotting it and putting it under a light), and take it back outside when the snow melts. When the tree finally grows lemons and they can be harvested, the little girl makes lemon juice and turns it into lemonade to sell so that she can buy some of the things on her wish list. But, instead of getting something electronic with the money she makes from her lemonade stand, she buys flowers and plants a garden.

Highly recommended - A lovely book about being polite when receiving an unwanted gift, following instructions, exercising patience, and sharing with one's community, all wrapped up in a sweet, colorful story. The book even includes a recipe for lemonade -- perfect! I love the illustrations. Almost every page has a little gray cat (not all, but most), which warms my cat-loving heart. And, there are a lot of smiles on the faces of the characters. When Grandma Gives You a Lemon Tree is a happy, uplifting, positive book that will encourage little ones to learn how to grown things -- not necessarily just lemon trees.

I received a copy of When Grandma Gives You a Lemon Tree from Sterling Children's Books for review and it's the first of 6 posts I'm going to publish for today's Children's Day. I'm going to try to schedule all the posts about 2 hours apart.


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