Baby's First Revisionist History Board Book

One of the fun things about being a parent is getting to introduce Zachary to things that we remember and enjoyed from our own childhoods: going to the beach (as we look forward to next week with mima and papa!), meeting fun animals at the zoo, enjoying a trip to the park, swinging, and most especially reading books that we recall our own parents reading to us. (Indeed, as I've mentioned some of the books we read to Zachary's grandma, she can drop right into a rote recitation of them; clearly Zachary isn't the only one who likes to hear the same book repeated ad nauseum!) Of course, all of Zachary's experiences are unique, and his perspectives and memories of them will be different than ours were. But at least the core content of the experience is the same, right?

Apparently not -- the books of our youth look to have been subtly changed from under us. Meh registered for one of her favorite children's books as a birthday gift, but the artwork had been dramatically updated and the text itself is labelled as a 'retelling'. And Meh thought she noticed a few updates to Zachary's current favorite Richard Scarry book (about trucks, of course), and while I chuckled at some of the dated vehicles (fuel oil trucks, anyone?), I didn't realize that his entire series has actually been politically corrected in the last few years; check out this fascinating before (1963) and after (1991) comparison of another book in his series.

On the same topic, as we discovered at Passover seder, even the classic haggaddah of our youth was updated last decade -- though the most major thing I noticed was that some of the archaic English language translations were updated. Is nothing sacred? :)