The Cat in the Hat Comes Back: 02/12/10

My all time favorite Dr. Seuss book is One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish. My second favorite is The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. Recently my son discovered the book for himself at the library and thought it was so much fun that he had to read it to me. I love it when he reads to me.

In the Cat in the Hat Comes Back the children are left home to shovel the snow while the mother is out shopping. The Cat in the Hat makes a reappearance and proceeds to make a mess with the building absurdity similar to the Laura Numeroff If You Give a — a — books. But Dr. Seuss's mayhem isn't circular. It just gets worse and worse, requiring more and more man (or cat) power to fix.

Things get out of hand immediately when the Cat decides to take a bath while eating pink frosted cake in the tub. The frosting leaves a ring around the tub and thus begins the boy and girl's long exasperating day of trying to fix the problem and trying to stop the Cat before he makes things worse.

The ring around the tub and the magical spreading spot of pink frosting have stuck with me all these years. As a child I had to bath in a tub that invariably had a soap ring around it when the bath was done. Since I loved to play with soap crayons in the tub the ring was typically some weird color too. So I felt a connection between my life and the book.

Now all these years later I'm reconnecting with an old favorite as my son giggles over things going from bizarre to bad to worse to surreal as the Cat in the Hat keeps finding smaller and smaller versions of himself under each hat to help clean up the mess.

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