I've Loved You Since Forever

New parents brimming with love for their little ones and looking for ways to express it can find many kids' books about love, and this one by a celebrity who adopted suggests a timeless connection. I've Loved You Since Forever by Hoda Kotb travels well-trodden kid book territory. The long list of books for kids about love includes some excellent ones that focus on love for an adopted child -- for instance, I Love You Like Crazy Cakes by Rose A. Lewis and Jane Dyer, and Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born by Jamie Lee Curtis and Laura Cornell. Kotb's book opens with a somewhat generic mention of a bird flying over a rainbow, and the rhythm of the text is a bit awkward, with some near-rhymes veering slightly off track ("trees" and "bees" with "we"). But it expresses the touching and reassuring message that parent and child were connected before birth, "waiting for the day our stars would cross and you and I turned into we."

Illustrator Suzie Mason adds warmth with her sweet pictures of animal parents and babies, showing a monkey riding on its mom's back, elephants twining trunks, a mother bird building her nest, and otters touching noses. To suggest the cosmic connection, she paints spreads of glistening night stars, underscoring the idea that parent and child, too, were up there twinkling.