Handle with care

Some time last year, the twins discovered my Calvin and Hobbes comic collection. They attacked all the books that I had painstakingly saved to buy when I was in college and haven't stopped reading it. We were thrilled that they loved the comics so much; the humour, the sass and the imaginary adventures he goes on with Hobbes. And all the more so after watching Inside Out and falling in love with Bing Bong (the imaginary friend from the movie.)

It's their lunch time reading, it's the first thing they reach for on the weekend mornings when they aren't rushing out to school, it's toilet reading; the books are found everywhere in the house. The problem is that at 8, their concept of looking after books is still very primitive. So the books that I'd lovingly kept for the past twenty years have disintegrated in the hands of the twins.

No doubt, the spines of the books are weak after all these years but oh the heart break when I saw a random cover on the table without the rest of the book and pages falling out of the others. I've been at it with Scotch Tape but while Scotch Tape is supposed to have "Reinforced Strength", it is no match for the voracity of the 8 year old readers who read the torn books ad nauseam. 

Nagging them hasn't helped the situation. I still find them stuffed in the couch, under the bed and sometimes in their school bags. So to give the books a break, I've gathered up the lot, patched them all up and then kept them while the twins unleashed their page flipping energies on other books.

Thank goodness that Packrat bought me a hard covered compendium some years back for my birthday but then again it's still heart breaking to see my old books mauled.