It puts the smile on its face; or it gets the hook again.
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UK references here, and possibly a bit old: The Tiger-skin Rug, by Gerald Rose. Actually, I have a video of me reading it for a friend’s kids during lockdown, which I can send you if you contact me.
Anything by David McKee, but especially “The Mystery of the Blue Arrows” and “I Hate my Teddy Bear”.
Harriet the Invincible by Ursula Vernon. - that one’s American.
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There is only one children’s book that both of my grown daughters took/bought new when they left the house. Not Suess, not Sendak:
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I don’t know whether it’s available as a board book, but my first thought to replace the blob fish is Swimmy by Leo Leonni. Beautiful illustrations, beautiful story of the little fish working together 
Pro tip: first download an mp3 of Saint-Saen’s The Aquarium (find one that features a glass harmonica) and play it softly while you read the story.
Another favorite is Once I Was by Niki Clark Leopold.
From Publishers Weekly:
Optimism radiates from this poem, which favors the present in its comparison of “then” and “now.” “I used to be afraid to swim,/ now I am a mermaid./ Once I couldn’t comb my hair,/ now I make a braid,” says a girl with long brown hair, who goes from standing apprehensively on a beach to diving deep in a blue, seaweedy ocean. In a sequence reading “Once the dark was scary,/ now I like the night,” a dark-haired boy rests in a sleeping bag under a starry sky. In the final pages, a baby’s bassinet (“I used to play alone…”) gives way to a picture of the girl and boy together (“but now I have a friend”). Their pets, a crimson dog and canary-yellow cat, frolic with them. Leopold wholeheartedly affirms the passage of time; her narrators start out as “the recipe” and become “the cake.” If the rhyme sometimes suffers from pedestrian content, Hubbard’s (Hip Cat) energetic artwork enlivens the volume. Solid, intense hues of paint put readers in mind of construction paper cutouts, while spiraling curve patterns and repetitive speckles suggest the freewheeling spirits of the speakers. Ages 5-up. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.<<
Don’t throw away the Pout fish book - as someone already mentioned, it’s going to be useful later on, in the stage where lots of learning comes from the “define what it is by looking at what it is NOT” category, and for the lesson, “Just because it’s in print doesn’t mean it’s true.”
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