Since shopping plastic bags are going the way of rabbit-ear antennas, it's a good idea to get your toddler started early. Here's a fun book with a surprise inside – "My Bag and Me", written by Karen Farmer and illustrated by Gary Currant (Penton Kids Press, 2008)

This colorful, 12-page book tells a story about how important it is to reuse bags – from a toddler's point of view. We all tote our kids along on our shopping trips, so they are familiar with the pictures in the book. The carriage, the checkout register, the bag of produce. Banana liked seeing these illustrations. (Full disclosure: the publisher sent me a free copy.)

Of course – the favorite part is the "prize inside" – a baby-sized bag. Banana drags her bag around with her full of her dolls, her shoes, sunglasses – it's yet to carry carrots, but that's OK.

The book's only bust is that is not made of recycled materials - but it is printed with soy ink and both the book and bag are recycled. When I contacted the company about it, they responded:

We purposefully chose not to use recycled paper from China, because it is actually worse for the environment due to the bleaching process that is used to "clean" the paper. The waste runoff from the bleaching process is not treated. While we hope that the book is not thrown away, both it and the Tyvek bag are 100% recyclable. When people ask why it was printed in China, it is because of cost. If we had tried to produce this domestically it would have cost three to five times greater, and therefore would never have been printed.

In the world of kids' books, that is probably standard unfortunately. I'll be posting information about some great publishers who do use recycled materials.

My Bag and Me is a cute, educational book. Might make a great Earth Day gift for someone!

My guess (hope?) is that by the time our children are old enough to understand the question, "Paper or plastic?" – the question will be moot, an old-fashioned notion. It'll be as difficult to understand as a typewriter with correction tape, having to walk over to the television to change the channel, or a world without answering machines.