This was one of those thrift store puzzles that almost breaks my heart. We love finding fantastic quality kids puzzles, assembling them, and then donating them. When we find one of such excellent quality that’s missing a piece it’s so much more of a disappointment than regular missing pieces to me.

This Mudpuppy puzzle was one of the best quality kids puzzles I’ve seen in quite some time. Extremely thick pieces, beautiful colors, excellent fit – and it even had a little extra something – a search and find aspect. All the pictures around the edges are also shown in the main image and they’re not all easy to find.

What a bummer that it’s missing a piece! It makes me sad, as a lover of puzzles, that they aren’t taken care of. (But I do remember childhood too, vaguely, so I also understand.) But for some strange reason these missing pieces makes me wish that I could go back to my childhood and take MUCH better care of all of my toys and things. If I had, not only would they be worth some big time cash right now, I’d still have some of the things I loved to play with as a child. How awfully sweet and uncharacteristically sentimental of me, right? I know!