A boy with a cold and his "Pettson and Findus"

My son has a cold and is home from day care this week. That means a lot of cuddling and unconditional love, but also a very tired mum and a baby that cries for attention. So, what do you do when the boy is not sick enough to sleep all day and not well enough to play? You put on a DVD. Our favourite for the moment is “Pettson and Findus”. Not only my son is mesmerized by it, I can’t stop watching and I definitely can’t do chores when it’s on. So, yesterday instead of doing the laundry I ended up in between my two boys under the duvet watching Pettson building a Santa Claus machine. It was lovely and by far the best moment of my day.

The movies about “Pettson and Findus” are based on the books by Sven Nordqvist. Sven Nordqvist is a talented Swedish children book author and illustrator and has many fans in and outside of Scandinavia. His “Pettson and Findus” books have been available in Swedish since 1985 and in English since 2007. You can find the English version of “Pettson and Findus” on Amazon.

For those of you who want to know more about “Pettson and Findus” here below I quote Wikipedia’s description of the characters.

“Pettson is an old farmer who lives in a ramshackle red-ochre-painted wooden farmhouse in the Swedish countryside. He is presumably a widower, as in Pettson Goes Camping he tells of a planned camping trip with his wife in his youth, but no children are mentioned. His neighbours regard him as a bit odd. However, he does have the company of a cat, Findus. Findus is dressed in a green-striped costume and wears a cap. Pettson and Findus can converse with each other, and the cat can stand up on his two hind legs like a human - Findus thus appears and behaves as if he were a small child. However, Findus, unlike Pettson, is aware of other "small creatures" living in the house, who play havoc with Pettson's belongings. Each of the books takes off from simple events, such as gardening, going fishing, preparing for Christmas, and so on. It emerges only in the most recent of the books, When Findus was little and disappeared, that the cat had been given to Pettson as a kitten, and that he had arrived in a cardboard box with the text "Findus peas" on the side - hence the inspiration for the choice of a name.”