Doing too much of this can make you go blind! Finding Waldo!

I don’t know about you but I absolutely loved the ‘Hidden Pictures’ page in Highlights magazine when I was a kid. Nothing beat finding an unmarked page at the doctor’s office waiting room and being able to look for them all yourself!

Well, I spent a very pleasant half hour with my two kids this evening, searching for our old pal, Waldo in the modern version of ‘Hidden Pictures’! Where’s Waldo, The Wonder Book, is the toughest Waldo book yet! We literally spent a good five minutes staring at a single spread, The Mighty Fruit Fight, before finding any of our hidden friends, and we spent a full half hour perusing the perplexing pages of this book without finding a single wizard! Yes, the Wizard Whitebeard is back as is Waldo, Wenda (the female version of Waldo, complete with the same red and white striped shirt but with a denim blouse instead of blue jeans) Woof (only his tail is visible on any given page) and Odlaw! Yep, I said Odlaw, a sort of twisted anti-matter version of Waldo, dressed in yellow and blackish brown stripes. I guess Odlaw is Waldo’s twin brother “whose good deeds are few indeed,” as the book tells us. Your mission is to find each one of these lads or lassies on each page, where they are WELL HIDDEN!

In addition to the characters, each page includes a hidden key, scroll, bone, camera, and set of binoculars! We found the binoculars the easiest to find, but did not find a single bone after a half hour. Maybe tomorrow night!

Martin Handford must be spending a gazillion hours doing the artwork for these books! The laughs are many in the subtle things you’ll find on each page! How fun is a spread titled simply ‘Toys, Toys, Toys’ or one called ‘The Cake Factory’? My daughter is a frosting freak and could’ve spent an extra hour drooling over that page with its gobs of frosting, batter, and toppings! My son is a fan of games and puzzles, and was enchanted with the ‘Game of Games’ page, where huge teams of green and orange players are battling wits on a humongous three-dimensional game board. Look closer and you’ll see that within the bigger game are many smaller games being played with dice, checkerboards, dartboards, and more.

The great thing about the Waldo books is that just when you think you’re about done, and you get to the last page, you are met with a CHECKLIST of many more fun things to find on each page. Perhaps you missed the teeny tiny sundial in the flower garden? Go back and find it! Did you see that snake reading in the Odlaw Swamp? Go back, quick, find it! What about that partridge in a pear tree on the ‘Fruit Fight’ page? You can’t miss that!

These are books that you can pick up a few months later and have just as much fun with it as you did the first time you opened it. They should come with a magnifying glass for parents, and you should make sure your lighting is good when you attempt to find Waldo and friends with your kids (or by yourself even!). These books are just plain fun and will leave you wanting more. The Wonder Book is heavy on entertainment! Twelve huge spreads of Waldo fun with great themes on every page. I hope you have as much fun with this book and my kids and I did this evening. WE plan to have this book again for bedtime tomorrow night! Next on our list of Waldo 'must-reads'is Waldo in Hollywood!

Thanks for Reading! Happy Waldo-hunting!