(Yes, there’s loads going on in the world, ecclesiastical and otherwise. Yes, I have things to say about it. But I’ve sort of switched into summertime mode, which involves a morning at the zoo (yes, again), a picnic, then reading outside on the blanket with Joseph while Michael naps, dinner on the back porch, blowing bubbles, reading novels, and the ongoing War With the Groundhog. I’m feeling rather lull-ish. Except in terms of the groundhog.)

The I Spy books are a good concept but an incredibly irritating reality. For the unitiated, the books involve two-page spreads of a splash of dozens of objects, in which the reader..er..viewer..is invited to search out various specific objects.

The reason they’ve come to irritate me is that I can never find anything. The volumes Joseph pulls from the library shelves (not the junior versions, mind you)  are always full of these monochromatic arrangements, either shadowy or all-white, and even with my reading glasses, I find myself looking in vain for the not-metaphorical needle in a haystack, which Joseph hardly ever finds either. I hate it. It makes my head hurt.

But you know what? I discovered a way out. Since I’ve been spying with a pre-reader for most of this time, and even now, with a barely-reader, I figured out that hey, he doesn’t know what the text is telling us to look for. So..if there’s a red rockinghorse in the left-hand corner, I say, "Find….a red rocking horse." And so on. Excellent. Why did it take me so long?

The point of this post was not only to share that discovery with other similarly afflicted parents, but to tell you about an alternative, if you aren’t already aware of it. The titles all start with 1001 Things to Spot… and titles include "on the Farm," "Long Ago," "in the Sea," and more. They are MUCH better (in my mind) than the I Spy series because they are not nearly as frustrating (okay, so I have spatial perception issues. I’m probably not the only one), and while there is definitely a puzzle aspect, it is not random like I Spy, and something might actually be learned about farms or rice paddies or what have you.

Along similar lines, I like the Look-Alike series in which scenes are constructed out of odd objects. They’re subtitled, "The more you look, the more you see," which means that the closer you look, you see that things are not what they seem:

There. See the pretzels? The matzoh? Good. Just my speed. Just right for my eyes.