Egg in the Hole Book by Richard Scarry, 1967.

This is a board book with a very special feature: a hole that goes all the way through the pages to the back of the book. There is something yellow, soft, and fuzzy in the hole, and it becomes obvious as you read the book what it is.

Henny lays an egg in the barn’s hayloft, but she loses it when it rolls through a hole. The anxious chicken immediately chases after it.

Down below, Billy Goat tells her that the egg fell on the ice cream that he was going to eat for dessert and then rolled out the window.

From there, Henny follows the egg’s path along a rain gutter, out a down spout, through a fence, into a hollow log, and eventually, into a hole in the ground.

When Henny fears that her egg is lost in the hole, a mouse comes out to tell her that the egg broke, but it has hatched into Henny’s new baby chick! (The yellow, soft, fuzzy thing.)

My brother and I used to like this book when we were little kids. I think of it as a kind of Easter story because of the bunny painting Easter Eggs, although the book isn’t really about Easter. Baby chicks are also often associated with Easter. It’s cute how the egg’s path is marked by little dots as it rolls across the barnyard, and the gimmick with the holes in the pages is clever.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). Of course, you can’t quite enjoy the effect of the hole feature with the electronic copies.