QUICK AND EASY TIP FOR CHILDREN'S PUZZLES

Have you ever walked into a room and found your little one making a "mountain" of toys on the floor for no particular reason? Lately my son has been doing just that. Most days, the hour right after he wakes from his nap involves him playing quietly in his room watching Mickey Mouse Clubhouse while I attempt to finish up some Thirty One business that I started while he was asleep.  The idea sounds easy enough right? Unfortunately within that small hour, my son manages to turn his room into a landfill; complete with every single piece of clothing in his dresser, all his books from his bookshelf, and most frustrating...every single puzzle he owns.  I walk into his room and for a second cannot process my thoughts because I am overwhelmed with the mess that I now have to help him clean up. Fortunately without much resistance he picks up his clothes and books and puts them away.  However the puzzles are another story altogether.

My 3 year old absolutely LOVES puzzles and we have tons of them.  When he was not even three yet, he was putting together 40-50 piece puzzles...which completely baffled everyone.  Not long after his 3rd birthday he was putting together 100+ piece puzzles. Naturally, the more puzzle pieces a puzzle has, the smaller they are.   So you can understand my frustration when he manages to dump five or more puzzles into a pile mixing them up together.  I usually spend 30 minutes at least trying to figure out what pieces go with which puzzle.  This takes up a lot of time that we could be doing something else, so I started doing something that I remember seeing when I was a child.

Although, I am sure this is nothing new and that many of you moms out there already had this idea. I just wanted to share because it has really saved me a lot of time in the afternoon.  Not only when my son manages to dump all his puzzles into one large pile, but also when he actually puts them together they end up spread out all over our floor and putting them away is much faster and easier now.  Especially when I find a stray piece laying on the floor somewhere.

This is so simple, I just assign each puzzle a number and write that number somewhere on the outer box or tin.  Then with a sharpie, I write that number on the back of each puzzle piece, so it's easy to see which piece goes with which puzzle.  Love it!