October through February is often known as flu season. Exposed to a host of germs in classrooms around the world, posters in libraries and doctors' offices alert parents and caregivers to ensure their children wash their hands and cover their mouths when they cough. Sometimes, those children who need to be tucked up in bed are back in school, still infected, because their parents have to rush back to work. Those, at home, find themselves covered in blankets, noses running and glands swollen, and feeling all crotchety. As a young boy, the famous author Robert Louis Stevenson often found himself ill at home, under the careful eye of Nurse Cunningham. Like your children, he watched the world outside his window go by.

Thankfully for us, Stevenson captured some wonderful insights into his world of Victorian England, and created such memorable poems as "The Land of Counterpane" and "Picture-Books in Winter." Published in our 1907 edition of A Child's Garden of Verses, it has been a popular read for many years. So today, give your tyke a crisp copy to read under the covers with a flashlight. He will keep warm, and before long he will be imagining himself as 'the captain of a tidy little ship', as he slumbers off to "The Land of Nod."

Labels: A Child's Garden of Verses, children's books, children's ebooks, flu season, picture books, Robert Louis Stevenson, The Land of Nod