The Bears' Activity Book

The Berenstain Bears' Activity Book
Stan and Jan Berenstain ~ Random House, 1979

So... I grew up in a small town (or what was a small town) in South Carolina called Pawley's Island. You had to drive thirty minutes south to get to the nearest library so often the book section in The Original Hammock Shop was my respite. It was more of a gift shop with a load of little gifty-type books, but it did have an OK children's collection. Man oh man, I could recognize that place on smell alone, even today. The Workman books like Henry Beard's sailing and golfing or The Official Preppy Handbook.... Peter Mayle's Where Did I Come From?. The spinner racks... Richard Scarry's Find Your ABCs... Simon Bond... 101 Uses for a Dead Cat. The memories of that place go on and on. One such book ~ or activity book rather ~ I was obsessed with, and when I finally got it, I loved and used it to pieces. For years as an adult, I searched for a replacement copy intact, and finally found one that wasn't super expensive. (I imagine all copies in uncut condition are pretty collectible for reasons similar to the one I just described.)

I was seven years old when this book was landed on the shelf and then directly into my hands. I bought it during the summer, and literally... I must have done every activity in it like 100 times. Things to color. Cooking projects. Calendars. Games. The Bear Country Barn Theater. Whenever it rained and I wasn't out trapping tad poles or climbing trees, my butt would be in a corner somewhere with this book doing something out of it. This book was so much fun that I remember every single page some 30 years later. The valentines. The holiday fun. The cut-out Bear Scout merit badges. But, the best part of all... it has a cut-out and assemble Bear Country. I mean, like the whole Bear Country... all of it. From Mayor Honeypot's car to The Honey Store to the tree house... and little paper cut-outs of all the characters... Grizzly Gran. Officer Marguerite. Great Natural Bear.

One rainy day, the boy and I are sure gonna have fun down that sunny dirt road... I... I mean, HE, can hardly wait.

Also by:
Berenstain Bears and the Spooky Old Tree
The Big Honey Hunt
The Bears' Nature Guide
The Bears' Almanac

Chlöe and Maude

Chlöe and Maude
Sandra Boynton ~ Little Brown, 1984

Happy day kids! I don't know if you all remember me waxing poetic about the little gift shop / bookstore at the Hammock Shops in Pawley's Island where I fell in love as a child with Mercer Mayer and the Bernstein Bears. Yes? No? Either way, another resident of those rooms was the always delightful Sandra Boynton. Her wonderfully cheery creatures covered that place from bookshelf to cash wrap in the form of cards, children's books and gift items.

Her first book published in 1977, Hippos Go Berserk!, is a sublimely silly little counting book featuring said hippos doing just that. Going totally bonkers. All her animals are endearing and delightful from the Snuggle Puppy (my son's favorite board book as a child) to her Philadelphia Chickens. Cows, pigs, ducks, sheep and kittens inhabit her imagination. And speaking of kittens, here we have a chapter book about two wee cat friends. Three stories, the first of which (The Art Lesson) was originally published in the November 1983 edition of Redbook magazine. I would've been too old to enjoy this one when it was released, but it doesn't mean I can't enjoy it now when my own child reads the words...

Chlöe loved to draw.

She drew magical castles and angry dancing dragons.

She drew trains with lots and lots of cars.

She drew spaghetti, her friend Maude, families, forests and elephants.

Chlöe's friend Maude did not like to draw.

Two best friends finding their way in a world where one draws realistic and the other spreads color! The other two stories are filled with even more sweet adventures. Chlöe, Maude & Sophia sees one changing her name and persona, but then deciding she likes herself just the way she is. Overnight shows how scary stories lead to the nighttime shivers. Real in its feelings and themes, each little illustration carries with it all the wonder and heartache of what it means to be a child.

Love, love, love the Boynton.




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The Zabajaba Jungle

The Zabajaba Jungle
William Steig ~ Farrar Straus Giroux, 1981

After hearing forever about this one from a friend of mine and searching junk shelves far and wide, I finally accepted defeat and turned to eBay... and just in time. You know, every once and I while, I have a mild panic attack thinking about all the awesome undiscovered books out there that my son will never have a chance to know. But, there are only so many hours a day in which you can root through junk shop book piles before it begins to wear on the fragile fabric of your child's adolescence. My son already knows far more about the nuances of thrift shopping that any normal four-year-old should. So, I have to stop mourning the books we'll never love and resign myself to the hope that the books that we were meant to know will find us.

Enter the fantabulous world of The Zabajaba Jungle. Like all the Steig Books we've loved before, it's beguiling setting is at times both strange and familiar, and the story line lives in a place so far outside the box that it's absolutely devoid of angles altogether. And there's a giant bird, which always makes a book top tier in my son's world. So, our tale begins...

Leonard is slashing at the vines and creepers with his sharp bolo. He is fighting his way into the Zabajaba Jungle, where, it is said, no human being has ever penetrated. Why is he there? He himself doesn't know. He just has to push on.

And push on he does, encountering oversized, insect-eating plants and a petrified monster, and when he stops to rest, he finds himself trapped in his hammock above a teaming bed of serpents. He is rescued by a giant butterfly, meets a 7-foot-tall bird, is captured by a gang of mandrills and has to explain himself to a council of animal-headed judges who will determine his fate. Tens thumbs up for imagination. Steig must have been an odd and wonderful creature himself to have imagined the worlds that he did. We are lucky to know him, even just through the pages of his books.

Also by:
The Amazing Bone
Amos & Boris
Rotten Island
Yellow & Pink
Shrek!
Gorky Rises
Tiffky Doofky
Father Palmer's Wagon Ride
Solomon the Rusty Nail


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