Hello Baby, It’s Me, Alfie

A child tracks a fetus’s in-utero development across this forward-looking story, which sees Hutchings and Lo drawing on the fruit-size-based visualizations of common pregnancy milestone markers. Tracing maturation from a six-week-old lemon pip to a 40-week-old pumpkin, the excited protagonist addresses the sibling-to-be with candor and curiosity. Each spread opens with the same greeting (“It’s me, Alfie”), followed by a mixture of often emotional life updates (“I drew you a rainbow, but I ran out of yellow. That’s what all the crying was about”) and reportage (“You kicked me today. I think you were saying, ‘I love you, Alfie’ ”). Naif pencil, crayon, and gouache artwork has a perspective-flattening quality; the light-brown-skinned characters sport simple features echoed by the emoji-like facial expressions scrawled on the fruit. It’s an accessible countdown peppered with amusing observations and a portrait of preparing for familial change. Background figures are portrayed with various abilities and skin tones. Ages 3–7. (Jan.)