The Puzzle War

They opened a new store nearby called Tuesday Morning. Rish goes there looking for toys relatively often, but we weren't familiar with it here. In fact, my daughter thought we were actually joking about time travel when we said we were going to Tuesday Morning.

Most of us weren't particularly impressed...except for my daughter, who was amazed by the whole wall of puzzles they had for sale at the store. She is cuckoo for puzzles. She talked her mother into buying her not one, but two puzzles from this wall, one was a simple 300 piece puzzle and the other a daunting 1,000 piece puzzle.

She came home, and got to work, flying through the 300 piece puzzle first. She had it finished by the end of the night (a feat that none of the rest of us could have achieved, but to her was no big deal).

The next day, she started into the 1,000 piece puzzle, finding the majority of the edge pieces and putting the frame together...that's when the struggle began.

No, I'm not just referring to the struggle to finish a hard puzzle. She could have easily handled that. She had more to contend with...namely, Jupiter the kitten.

Jupiter loves to play with little toys like marbles, Legos, and balls. Sometimes, she can be entertained for hours by a simple scrap of paper that has fallen on the floor. So, when she got up on the table and saw all those little puzzle pieces, her mind was captured. She wanted to play with them.

My daughter didn't realize at first that she had an enemy to fight with. She left her puzzle partly finished on the table as she has every other time she's put together a difficult one.

The next morning, when I came out to get my nine-year-old ready for school, I found dozens of puzzle pieces on the ground. I didn't know the culprit, so I just gathered them all up and put them back on the table.

Later on, I caught Jupiter on the table (she's not allowed up there, but it takes an awful lot to teach a cat their boundaries). When I went to put her back on the ground, I noticed that she had a puzzle piece in her mouth. I snatched it out, put the kitten on the ground, and texted my daughter:

You better watch out. I caught Jupiter on the table with a puzzle piece in her mouth. And that happened after we picked about 50 pieces up off the floor. I don't know if she knocked them all off or if it was me with the laundry, but you might have a puzzle saboteur in your midst. Better finish it quicker than you did with the puzzle Grandma gave you.

To which she responded with a simple:

Ah!

She had been warned, but when she got home from school and saw the actual damage, she texted me back:

You didn't mention that she destroyed the whole thing...Like 5 hrs...And the entire frame of it is missing or disconnected

She almost gave up right then and there, defeated. I don't know if I talked her out of it or if she reached inside to a reserve that she saved for times of adversity, but she decided to redo the work she'd already done on the puzzle, and came up with a strategy to keep the kitten off of the puzzle.

Each day, as she finished working on the puzzle, she covered it (including all the loose pieces) with a light blanket that would keep Jupiter from seeing the pieces and going after them. Also, she spent more time on it than she might have otherwise, so she could get it done faster.

Even though she couldn't see the puzzle, Jupiter seemed to know it was under there. She kept getting up on the table and sitting on the blanket that was hiding the puzzle pieces.

My daughter pushed through, and within a week, she had to whole puzzle together....

...Except for the missing piece. We searched around on the floor and found all but one of the puzzle pieces to finish the puzzle off.

So, I guess she didn't quite win after all. We kept the puzzle on the table for another week, hoping that the last piece would show up, but it never did. Maybe Jupiter carried it off somewhere. She probably has a horde of things that caught her eye that she goes and rolls around in or something like a Tolkein dragon.

Will that instinct wear off as the kitten grows to become a cat? Or will my daughter have to fight with her every time she decides to put together a puzzle? I guess that remains to be seen.