The Work of a Child - Part 2

Probably one of the most ANNOYING (but unfortunately productive, educational) toys out there (and in "here") are

PUZZLES.

For the love of all things good in this world...

...we needed to DRASTICALLY reduce the number of incomplete puzzles and random pieces floating around in our house STAT. The "lovely" thing about puzzles is that you need to stinkin BUILD every one of them to figure out whether they are complete and which pieces are missing. 

Someone *may* need to look up a psychiatric facility for me when I'm done with this section of home/toy simplification. Or just buy me a vacation. Or a stiff drink...if it's after November...

 First step was getting on my hands and knees, and searching every square inch of our house for puzzle pieces. I combined everything I found with the few BOXES of mismashed puzzles that I already had, and got to work. I'm still missing about 30% of all the puzzles, but after about 3 hours....

What you don't see in the picture are about 15 peg puzzles stacked up along the side of the living room, and about 3 other boxes of all the other random pieces that don't seem to fit anywhere. How does that even happen?

By the way, I am begging all of you to never,

ever,

EVER

buy our kids more Frozen puzzles. They're all kind of similar to each other in the backgrounds/style, have a gazillion pieces, no picture to reference, and no cheat symbols on the backs. I came super close to just throwing them all away right then and there.

After multiple days of never having a long enough block of time to actually finish this project, necessitating multiple clean-ups and re-builds (and hours...and hours....of annoying kids puzzles and seizure-inducing colors/shapes), I ended up with about 10 puzzles to donate/gift to other kiddos, at least 5 puzzles that we simply had to throw away due to missing pieces or being ripped to shreds after so much use...5-10 beginner peg puzzles, and 10 (12-20ish piece) puzzles for the older kids. Of the ones we're keeping, I split them into 4 bags (including a variety of each type and difficulty level in each bag) for rotation. I also made sure to use a sharpie to add a small "x" "o" heart, star, or other symbol on the back of each piece of each completed puzzle before breaking them down and separating them into baggies. Hopefully this will help with getting rogue pieces into the right bags without having to build every last puzzle.

I can't tell you how relieved I am to be done with this. Now they will have access to 5 puzzles MAX during each rotation. And we're officially going to start tracking down and sorting all the pieces correctly before bagging and rotating out with the next set from now on - that's not a huge deal with only 5 puzzles!

Who needs a drink? (says the pregnant momma...)