Yesterday I painted the walls in Pig Jr.'s room. Today, I painted the baseboard trim in there. Neither of those activities was well thought out, since Pig Jr. is home from school on the weekends. Trying to keep a four-year-old away from the wet paint in his own bedroom is quite the challenge. We finally settled for him playing on his bed, which I had pushed into the very middle of his room. Thankfully, paint dries relatively quickly, but I still wanted to keep him away from the walls just in case.
Pig Jr. has the smallest bedroom in the house. I figured that finishing up his room last would mean that I had less to do to get his room ready for our upcoming Open House. When I moved his furniture into the center of the room, I discovered just how wrong I was.
My little man has a foot locker that he uses as a toy box. He has not been very good at putting his toys back into it when he is done playing, and it was overflowing. I figured that I could spend a few minutes to straighten out his mess before putting the foot locker back where it belongs once the paint was dry. Then he snuck over to it while I was rinsing out my paintbrushes and dumped half of it out on the floor and on the newly painted trim. I came back from the utility sink to kidlet-sized footprints all over his floor and random toys strewn everywhere.
I cleaned up the wet footprints and shooed my little boy out of the room while I attempted to pack everything back into his toy box. Unfortunately, most of what was in the foot locker was puzzles. With just a few exceptions, none of them were in their box or bag. This means there were about twenty puzzles' worth of puzzle pieces all mixed together on his floor. Take a wild guess at what I spent a good chunk of my afternoon doing. That's right. I sorted through, assembled then disassembled, and then bagged puzzle pieces.
I was amazed at how many puzzles Pig Jr. owns. They range from as few as twenty-four pieces to as many as a hundred. A couple of the puzzles are kidlet-sized and span three or four feet once assembled on the floor. He even owns a few lenticular puzzles. Those puzzles alone took me over an hour to assemble. That fake 3-D thing they have going on is not easy to do, even with a hundred pieces, on the floor with a glaring overhead light. I say this as a puzzle-lover who thinks that any puzzle with fewer than 1500 pieces is for wimps.
As a side note, I am convinced that lenticular puzzles are brutal on adult eyes, particularly adult eyes that are already strained from painting trim. You could not pay me enough to ever assemble one of them again. I despise them so much that when I accidentally bent one of the puzzle's pieces, I chucked the whole thing into the garbage can with a malicious chuckle. The next lenticular puzzle I ran across, I asked Horse to put together for me. She was just as frustrated with it as I was, and gave up after working for half an hour and not accomplishing much of it at all. I'm thinking it will soon be fed to Oscar just like the other one.
It took hours to get everything organized and back into Pig Jr.'s foot locker. This was not what I intended to spend today doing, but I suppose I can be glad I accomplished something. Our Open House is one week away, and there is still so much that needs finishing. I am a bit leery about the Open House anyway. It seems like we will be doing an insane amount of cleaning, fixing, and organizing for our nosy neighbors to come in and poke around while we are not here. At least our Realtor will have plenty of now-organized puzzles to occupy him if no one shows.
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