My mom always had this fantasy that we were the type of family that would have a table set up in the family room where we would work on a giant puzzle.

This never happened. Ever.

I mean, there was a table back there. But it was usually covered in a ton of stuff from the million kids and their activities. I’m not sure where she got this idea. We never did this. I don’t remember my grandparents doing this but maybe they did.

McKenna has recently started wanting to play with puzzles. Not board puzzles or inset puzzles. But big (for her) jigsaw puzzles. At school, she spent all day working on a 60 piece Ravensburger Puzzle (truly the best puzzles out there). When we started spending more time at home, I ordered three 60 piece and even a 100 piece. I thought…peace and quiet for days!

BUT…in the month or so since McKenna worked for hours and hours on a 60 piece puzzle at school, she must haven gotten a little more confident. She started whizzing through these in under 45 minutes…the first try. She even boasted that she was a rule breaker because she was doing puzzles meant for 6+.

There goes my peace and quiet.

A puzzle I had forgotten I ordered showed up yesterday as I was leaving for an OB appointment. She sat down to work on it with sheer delight in her eyes. When I got home, she was sad to report that a piece was missing.

How can this be? She JUST opened the box. Grandpa informed me that George did run off with a piece when they first started. This is probably why we never had that puzzle table my mom always wanted. With 6 kids under 11, there was bound to ALWAYS be a piece missing.

But honestly, that didn’t stop McKenna from taking the puzzle apart and putting it back together another 5 times–always missing the same piece. Her confidence building each time and her happiness never diminishing when the piece was still missing. In the end, the missing piece didn’t matter nearly as much as I had thought it would.

Maybe WE would be the family with a jigsaw puzzle table.

And as we cleaned up before bed last night–there it was. Under the couch just waiting to be placed. A puzzle completed.

I am writing for the 2020 Slice of Life Challenge.