{"id":1413,"date":"2007-06-15T15:31:14","date_gmt":"2007-06-15T15:31:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/06\/i-spy-survival-guide.html"},"modified":"2007-06-15T15:31:14","modified_gmt":"2007-06-15T15:31:14","slug":"i-spy-survival-guide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/06\/i-spy-survival-guide.html","title":{"rendered":"I Spy survival guide"},"content":{"rendered":"

(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.)<\/p>\n

The I Spy <\/em>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.<\/p>\n

The reason they’ve come to irritate me is that I can never find anything<\/em>. 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 <\/em>it. It makes my head hurt.<\/p>\n

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 <\/em>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?<\/p>\n

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…<\/em><\/a> and titles include "on the Farm," "Long Ago," "in the Sea," and more. They are MUCH better (in my mind) than the I Spy <\/em>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<\/em>, and something might actually be learned about farms or rice paddies or what have you.<\/p>\n

Along similar lines, I like the Look-Alike series<\/a> 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:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There. See the pretzels? The matzoh? Good. Just my speed. Just right for my eyes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nI Spy survival guide - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/06\/i-spy-survival-guide.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"I Spy survival guide - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"(Yes, there’s loads going on in the world, ecclesiastical and otherwise. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1413\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}