National Puzzle Day 2020

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It’s National Puzzle Day! Today is the day to celebrate all things puzzle – jigsaw puzzles, crosswords, logic puzzles, sudoku, word searches, etc. I enjoy puzzles of all kinds, but it won’t be a surprise for you to hear that jigsaw puzzles are my favorite. I learned my love of puzzles from my family, so today is a day for me to remember and appreciate my loved ones as well as enjoying some puzzles.

Every year I write a special post on this day, to remember the people who helped me love jigsaw puzzles as much as I do. This year, with my heart still broken from losing my mom, all I can think about is her and how much we enjoyed puzzling together. We’ll never sit together in front of a puzzle board again, and the loss still feels too heavy to bear.

I miss her on many levels, she was my mother after all. But in her later years we became the best of friends, and our shared love of all things jigsaw puzzle was one of the reasons why. We could talk about, look at, shop for, and work on puzzles for hours on end; no one else in our lives felt about puzzles the way we did, and we loved sharing them with each other. She was the first and most important member of my puzzle posse, and I miss her terribly.

My mother encouraged me to assemble the world’s largest jigsaw puzzle, and to start this blog; she was my first follower, my most faithful reader, and always cheered me on. My love of puzzles blossomed mostly because I was always able to share them with her, and they will always be a reminder of her too.

National Puzzle Day will forever be a day for me to remember my mother, and her mother – the two women in my life who taught me to love puzzles of all kinds. I got my start with jigsaw puzzles as a child at my grandmother’s side, and spent countless hours as an adult side by side with my mother assembling them. They were beautiful, kind, loving women, and for me this day is another reason to remember and honor them.

Happy National Puzzle Day my friends!

I miss you Gram, I miss you Mom. 💖

National Puzzle Day 2019

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Happy National Puzzle Day!

Here at My Jigsaw Journal I’m sure you can guess which type of puzzles we love the most, but today isn’t just for jigsaw puzzles, it’s puzzles of all kinds – crosswords, logic, brain teasers, anagrams, word searches, etc. If you like to “puzzle” you are definitely welcome here, but the focus is definitely on jigsaws. 😉

I’ve done puzzles since I was very young, mostly at my grandmother’s side. She always seemed to have a jigsaw puzzle in progress at her house, and she was never impatient with my sisters and me picking up pieces and trying them in every single empty spot (regardless of color or shape). She had the patience of a saint sometimes! This is a photo I shared on this day back in 2017 of the two of us at her house sometime in the mid-1970’s.

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This is my favorite picture of us, although it’s been around 45 years or so since I was that cute!

Nowadays I mostly puzzle alone; but sometimes I’m fortunate enough to get to assemble jigsaws with one or more members of my small “puzzle posse” – Mom, hubby, daughter, and my oldest son. Many times the solitude of puzzling by myself is exactly what I need, but I also enjoy being able to spend time with loved ones around the puzzle board. Being together, working towards a common goal, laughing, teasing, celebrating the small victory of a found piece or connecting two sections – these are worth more to me than any “thing” could ever be. For me, jigsaw puzzles are a family thing. 🙂

I love jigsaw puzzles of all kinds, and I love the calm that puzzling seems to bring me. I started this blog for a giant puzzle project, but have kept it going because I enjoy assembling, talking, and writing about jigsaw puzzles of every shape and size. If you’re new here feel free to stick around and check out the puzzles I’ve put together over the past few years. If you’re a regular reader, thanks for hanging out and talking puzzles with me. I appreciate every single one of you!

Thank to my regular readers for sharing your P.A.D.S. diagnoses too, it helps to know we are not alone. Tell your puzzle friends about this syndrome so they too can be a part of the PADS Posse, and this community of fellow sufferers. We are all here for each other!😂😂

I hope you find time today to turn off those electronic screens and spend some time with whatever kind of puzzle makes you happy. This may surprise you, but I think I’ll spend part of today assembling a jigsaw puzzle or two. Shocking! 😱

Enjoy National Puzzle Day my friends!

National Puzzle Day 2018

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3 generations of women worked on this puzzle together, finished it together too!

Happy National Puzzle Day my friends! Today’s the day to enjoy puzzles no matter where you’re from or what kind of puzzles you like. It doesn’t have to be a jigsaw puzzle; you can do a word search, sudoku, crosswords or any puzzle that makes you happy. My love of puzzles comes from my family, so National Puzzle Day is a day for me to appreciate my loved ones as well as enjoying my jigsaw puzzles.

Last year my puzzle day post was mostly about my grama, she was the one who started me on the puzzling path; she was smart as a whip, and always working on some kind of puzzle. Jigsaw puzzles were her favorite, but she loved puzzles of many kinds – crosswords, anacrostics, word search, logic problems, etc. This year though, this post is about my momma. Grama got me started, but mom keeps me going. ❤

When I was injured several years ago, mom and I both got back into jigsaw puzzles; I needed something to do to stave off the boredom, she joined me – and it has snowballed from there! We text pictures of our puzzles to each other, send email with links to awesome puzzles we’ve found online, and can talk on the phone about jigsaw puzzles for lengths of time that would astound you! She doesn’t roll her eyes when I’m talking about a puzzle I want or how much fun I’m having with my current puzzle, and she’s quite the enabler with her black belt thrift store shopping skills. Whenever I want to talk puzzles, I want to talk to my mom.

I enjoy my alone puzzle time, I listen to music or stand up comedy and can relax and enjoy the process. But it’s so much more fun to work on puzzles with mom. We talk and laugh, tease each other, and we can cuss up a storm when things aren’t going well or we can’t find that one elusive piece we’ve been searching for! (There is something so adorable and funny about little old ladies cussing, she makes me giggle when she swears 👵)

Puzzles are much more fun with mom around to share them with me, and I try not to take for granted the time we spend puzzling together. She was recently out of the country for 10 days, and her first day back we assembled 2 and a half puzzles and spent the whole day together. I missed her so much! Puzzling is so much nicer for me with my loved ones, and I’m so glad mom and I make up such a great puzzle posse. 🙂

I hope you spend today with a great puzzle and hopefully with someone you love. Puzzles are great for keeping your mind sharp, and for me they also keep my heart connected to the wonderful women in my family who made me the puzzle fanatic I am today, and gave me their time and love in the process. I miss you gram, and I love you mom❣

Happy National Puzzle Day everyone, and for those of you participating in the Jigsaw Jubilee – happy puzzling and good luck!

 

Happy National Puzzle Day!

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Enjoy National Puzzle Day everyone!

Of course I’m most partial to jigsaw puzzles, but enjoy National Puzzle Day however you like. Crosswords, sudoku, video games (man I loved Tetris!), word searches, anacrostics, whatever puzzles make you happy! If you’re not in the US, we’ll share our day – enjoy puzzles anyway!

I have my grandmother to thank for my love of jigsaw puzzles. She was always working on puzzles, for as long as I can remember. I will never forget her sitting in her chair in the living room with a big board across the ottoman/footstool working on a puzzle. When I would spend the night at her house sometimes she’d be working on a jigsaw puzzle in her chair and I would kiss her goodnight, then I would wake up in the morning and there she was still sitting there working on the puzzle!  It was much more complete than the night before because she’d been up ALL NIGHT working on it! 😮 I remember thinking “I can’t wait till I’m a grownup and can work on a puzzle all night if I want to!” Wouldn’t it be great if adulthood was like we thought it would be as kids? Staying up late, eating ice cream for dinner, buying candy whenever we wanted, controlling the tv – no phone bill, boring job, people to take care of, house to clean – being an adult is gonna be AWESOME! 😐

I always loved working on puzzles with her and not just jigsaws, she loved crosswords and logic problems and all sorts of puzzles. I always got to do the easy crosswords in her puzzle magazines because she was so good she was able to do the expert ones and even the expert crossword puzzles that were diagramless (you have to figure out where the words go – no numbers or shaded boxes to help you!) She always helped me with the answers I didn’t know and even taught me how to work the diagramless ones, although I can usually only do the easy or medium ones. My love of puzzles of all kinds came from her and I always think of her when I buy a puzzle magazine or spend too much time working on a jigsaw late into the night. How cool that National Puzzle Day is exactly one week before her birthday – she would have loved that!

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Me and Grama on a sleepover night – check out those awesome 70’s pajamas I’m rockin!

So enjoy national puzzle day everyone, maybe do a simple crossword with a child or help them with an easy jigsaw puzzle. You might instill a love of puzzles in a child that will be with them forever. Perhaps carve out a little “me time” and work on a jigsaw puzzle or a brain teaser all by yourself, or ask a loved one to help you and spend some time together. You might just create a wonderful memory. 🙂