Puzzles & ducks

So for the past few months, one word can sum up our life: puzzlemania.

The kids have always enjoyed puzzles, but this summer it reached to near-obsession.

They would wake up.  At 6:00 am.  And pull out puzzles.

25 piece, 50 piece, 100 piece, 200, 1000, 1500. 

Animal, space, biblical, travel, glitter, sound-making, lenticular, wood, plastic, cardboard, three-dimenstional, shaped, old, new, from the thrift store. Whatever.  No puzzle was immune.

 Puzzles in boxes, pouches, and trays.

Puzzles out for days and days.

 This puzzle actually had puzzles within the puzzle.  Nate helped out on this one.  Actually a couple of nights he just sat at the island and worked on it.
We had friends over.
And they worked on it too.
It was a relationship-building thing.

Pieces . . . yeah, they were everywhere.
I mean the kids were quiet and completely abosorbed for hours.  I really shouldn't complain.  It's just that hundreds of pieces were constantly underfoot, coating every square foot of our house in . . . puzzle.

I'm not saying I was tempted to just vacuum everything up.

Nothing says "good morning!" like stepping into the kitchen onto a glitter horse puzzle and hearing screams of horror: "But I was WORKING on that one!"

Svea works on really old puzzles (mine when I was about her age).

 A new puzzle from Grandpa and Grandma Daisy! (They had heard about the puzzle insanity and were quick to respond.) 

 Dragging the blanket through the pieces and distributing them throughout the house.
As you can imagine Nate was not really cool with all of this.
It's not that he doesn't love puzzles (I mean who doesn't love a good puzzle) but one can only take so many open boxes and half-finished puzzles lying around for so long.
All told, at one point I think we had roughly 30,000 pieces out simultaneiously.
They got picked up . . . eventually.

And then there were ducks.
The kids were working on puzzles after breakfast one morning (obviously) when I looked out the window and saw ducks in the neighbor's yard.
I went out with some bread and convinced to come to our yard.
It worked.  All of those little duckies followed me across the street to our place.
It was our neighborhood pond's family of 13 ducks.  But there were three extra this time (perhaps some visiting, migrating family members).

 The kids sat outside and fed them.

We ran out of bread. 
So we got out the puzzle pieces . . .