American friends brought us a lovely book called Everywhere Babies when my DD was new and it took me a long time to read it without choking up. It's a great book with lovely drawings of babies in different families, different scenarios and doing all the different things babies do, all in rhyme like "Every day, everywhere, babies are fed" and it ends with "Every day, everywhere, babies are loved/For doing so much, for travelling so far/For being so wonderful/Just as they are"
Actually, the same American friends bought us a book for DS called Fireboat, about an old fireboat which was called out of retirement to fight the fires on September 11, and that always chokes me up. It's well done, not too graphic or scary for kids, but there's a bit when they talk about the crew winning an award for helping New York City in its hour of need and how the boat was not useless, not forgotten, that I always found very moving.
Love Peepo, love Dogger, love Tiger who Came to Tea. Shirley Hughes is a genius at giving a kid's perspective - we also love the Alfie stories, and we have one called Angel Mae about a girl who is the angel in her school nativity but her mum can't come because she's gone to hospital to have the new baby, and Mae is all sad but brave.
The other book from my childhood I used to read the kids was John Burningham's The Blanket - which I was convinced was all about me (even though the kid in the picture is clearly a boy) because I had a blanket! And it did get lost once! And we did find it again!