Jenn Ski

I've been feeling a reading slump stalking me; if it were a cat it would be wiggling its butt right about now.

Part of it is the growing size of my TBR pile: I admit I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed by its sheer altitude and I'm unconsciously (and not so unconsciously) putting pressure on myself to "zip through a few". When I mentioned this to my husband his reply was "who cares how big it is? All your BookLikes friends have MUCH bigger piles than you do anyway." I love this man.

Anyway, I'm still not feeling the voracious hunger to read so I decided to do something completely different, rather than falling back on my old stand-by, the re-read (which would only make me feel guiltier right now). Puzzles are out (dammit) because one of our cats, Carlito, would lose his little kitty mind over all those puzzle pieces and we'd never, ever see them again.

But... I bought this book when I was in Amsterdam because I loved the mid-century illustrations and I thought when my nieces were next here, they could color their Frozen pictures and I could play the cool Aunt and color one of these. Well, I pulled it out a few days ago along with the coloured pencils and started on my first one.

You know what? It's HEAPS of fun! Jigsaw puzzle fun, only without chasing Carlito and prying the damp pieces out of his mouth. Even, dare I say it? my husband - the footie watching, beer drinking poster child of Aussie men everywhere - picked one out and started in. We're as close to zen as either of us are likely to ever be.

I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to "kid out" and looking for an excuse to get that Crayola mega box just for themselves. Very nice, high-quality, heavy paper with quality illustrations and each page is perforated for easy removal (watching me psyche myself up to tear a page out of a book was very entertaining for the DH, btw).… (meer)