A couple of months ago, one of the moms in our virtual book club was asking when I started reading chapter books to the girls. The answer was much easier for Ellie than it was for Samantha since I just started dipping my toes into chapter books at bedtime with her (she turned five last month).

Now, I’m not a stick hard and fast to the rules kind of girl. Not every four year old will be able to sit and listen to you read them a chapter. And there might be three year olds who will. You know your kid best. If the little booger will sit through three stories at a time and eats it all up, why not give it a try?

I put together a list of five of our favorite read aloud chapter books for young kids. These aren’t terribly long and there are pictures sprinkled in to help keep your kids’ attention. Plus, each one on this list includes a main character (or two) that your kids can’t help but get attached to.

(And yes, Ellie is wearing a cat costume while looking through books because this is real life and that is what fabulous people do.)

One of the most important things to me as a mother—aside from raising strong, opinionated girls who stand up for what they believe in—is planting the seeds necessary for my kids to grow into loving, caring, giving, kind adults.

This desire—which, to be honest, is more like an obsession—has only grown stronger since the horrific events in Paris this weekend. As if terror and bloodshed wasn’t enough, the hate that volleyed around social media made me even more nauseous.

I believe fiercely in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

I also believe that working your hardest to raise caring, compassionate, kind humans is infinitely more effective in making the world a better place than sitting behind your computer spewing hate.

Parenting is not easy and no parent is perfect. I am the first one to jump up and admit that. That said, I do think there are a few things you can do to get a leg up in the Raising Kind Humans Department. Spoiler alert: they all include modeling kind behavior.

We stood in front of racks filled with candy, the girls’ eyes wide as they scanned the recognizable packaging for something that jumped out at them. I prodded them to hurry up—OK, strongly urged is probably closer to the truth. We were going to be late. We were meeting our friends at the movie theater next door but had stopped in to pick up way less expensive candy (shhhh, don’t tell).

Samantha made her choice and immediately flipped the package over to read the back. “Mom?” she said. “I don’t think this has nuts, but can you check to make sure it’s safe for Maddie?” She wasn’t planning on sharing her candy, but she knows that Maddie has a serious nut allergy and wanted to make sure her buddy would be safe.

My momma heart burst a little, especially since lately I’ve noticed one too many adults having little to no regard for the safety of kids with food allergies. They complain about the inconvenience of having to work around allergies for school snacks and birthday parties. They are incensed that their children have to “miss out” because another kid has an allergy.

My children don’t have food allergies and I’m pretty much a tree hugging hippie, but thought processes like those fill me with rage.

Usually I wear multitasking like a bad ass badge of honor. Yes, I answered emails while carrying a whiny preschooler on my hip and navigating an extra large cart around the grocery store like a champ. Because I’m a BOSS.

Only not really.

Because, when I’m being totally honest with myself, multitasking never results in a job well done. My email will be partially incoherent, I’ll inevitably forget something essential at the store and my four year old and I will be so irritated with each other that we’ll both be whining shrilly and ready to full-on tantrum by the time I slam the trunk of the car.

When your attention is split in 87 different directions you can’t possibly do a good job.

So why do we (women in particular) place so much of our self worth on exactly how many balls we have up in the air?

One of my favorite things to do when it comes to reading books to the girls is finding variations of the same tale and reading (or watching) them together. Ellie (who is four) is at a particularly fun age for this. I love to watch her eyes get wide when she notices connections and I love watching her knit her eyebrows together and scrunch up her nose when she doesn’t like a particular deviation from the story she holds as “true.”

Ellie is never more of a stickler than when it comes to the story of Rapunzel. To her, the movie Tangled is gospel and thou shalt not mess with that shit. After a few failed attempts at looking at different versions of the story that just left her annoyed, I decided it was time to move on to another fairy tale.