Puzzle pile

Puzzles are all the rage in this house lately. In the post-birthday-and-Christmas madness, I think we have close to a dozen 25-piece puzzles floating around, seven or eight of which are upstairs on my reading shelf next to the couch. Zoey typically likes to start off her day with a puzzle or two, so this morning, as I was waiting for my caffeine to kick in, I made the insane suggestion that we put together ALL her puzzles today.

Which was my first mistake.

After each puzzle was complete, we'd move it aside and start in on another one.

Mistake number two.

The intact puzzles remained scattered all over the living room floor for most of the day. At one point I even thought of snapping a picture, to post on the blog and be all 'look how great my kid is, and how smart she is for putting together all these puzzles'.

Ha. Number three.

So, there I was in the kitchen, fixing dinner, thinking Zoey was keeping herself entertained in the living room with yet another puzzle, and some strange song she seems to have invented on her own, sung to the tune of Row, Row, Row Your Boat and possibly containing the word 'shit'. (Further questioning on the lyrics always warrants an innocent "I don't know!" response. Interesting.)

Anyway, we eat dinner, I do the dishes, Bryan finishes up with changing the oil in my car, and I start Zoey's bath. We're all pumped to watch the new Maisy DVD and eat popcorn before bed. (Okay, full disclosure. Bryan and I are not pumped at all for a Maisy DVD. Maisy is annoying, if you want the truth.) And, as I'm heading for the bathroom to wash my child's greasy hair, I happen to glance in the living room.

And see all the puzzle pieces in one pile. On the floor. One big heap. We're talking eight puzzle's worth of pieces.

Needless to say, I am totally annoyed by this finding and lecture Zoey through her entire bath about how not cool it is to pile every puzzle piece you own in a big stack in the living room. After bath time, Bryan and I start putting each puzzle back together (20 minutes of our life that we'll never get back) and Zoey repeats over and over "I'm so sorry I did this. Can we still watch Maisy? What about popcorn?" We make her put each puzzle back in it's respective box and, as HER FATHER AND I FINISH DOING ALL THE REAL WORK, Zoey sighs and says "Phew. I'll never do that again."

So, I was going to brag today about how cool my kid is, doing these 25-piece puzzles with one hand tied behind her back and all. Good thing it turns out she can be a total pain in the neck sometimes. Because braggy parents are sooo annoying.