Always! I've Loved You Since Forever by Hoda Kotb

Before birds flew over rainbows....

There was you ...

And there was me.

It seems that love for the newborn child is forever, as if everything that has gone before in a parent's life has led to this moment.

Hoda Kotb's sweet little letter to her new child, I've Loved You Since Forever (Harper, 2018), captures that real feeling that love is eternal. Kotb's text is lyrical, ascribing that love to a time before the first dawn, the first sunrise, sunset, twilight and starry sky. In that effort the author owes much to artist Suzie Mason's elegantly tender illustrations of animal mother and child pairs, set forth in varied habitats, with a backdrop of dawn and daylight, dusk and dark, in sunshine, shadow, and a night sky lit by stars.

Birds and bees, elephant mother and child linking trunks, an otter mom floating with her pup on her chest, a deer and spotted fawn curled up together, all seem part of that timeless love, and Mason's soft and delicate images are delicately evocative of that devotion.

It's an idyllic but moving hymn to love for little ones, leading to the conclusion that human mother and child are a pair that were meant to be:

There was you, and there was me....

And you and I turned into WE.

"A bighearted celebration of new motherhood that may especially appeal to families with adopted children," opines Publishers Weekly.