Puzzles, Squirrels

The children are into puzzles right now. I’ve had them put up in a bin on the closet shelf for awhile, but yesterday Haniya and Naomi asked me to get them down. When Haniya and Naomi were little, we never put them away and so the girls always worked on puzzles.

Mikah has never been interested in puzzles before. He doesn’t like to sit still and focus for very long. He is definitely our fidgeter. Before dinner last night, he dumped a challenging puzzle of Mount Rushmore out onto the table. After a few minutes of attempting to put it together, and being overhwhelmed, he gave up. I told him he had to finish it so I could serve dinner. I thought it would be a battle, but he took the challenge and sat down. He sat there for over an hour until the whole thing was done. Jeff encouraged him by telling him the same thing he’d told the girls when they were learning how to approach puzzles — “Match the colors and extend the lines.” And little by little, Mikah did it! By the time he finished, we’d all eaten, so Mikah ate a solitary, but proud dinner. This morning, he has put that same puzzle together three more times.

All the kids are feeling pretty good today. We’re going to be eating light foods today so I don’t stress their tummies. Chicken noodle soup is on the menu for dinner tonight, along with our usual big, dark green salad.

I haven’t given a Clean One Thing Every Day update for awhile. Yesterday, I tackled the back porch which was a mess of recyclables, empty buckets, winter mud and clutter. We have a table out there that Jeff built, on which we store our broken down cardboard boxes, bike helmets, and sytrofoam coolers of fruits. Up to last month, I stored a big styrofoam cooler full of apples on the top shelf of this table. That was until the squirrels found out about our great apple supply. We would often come home and find styrofoam litter all over the porch. One day, Naomi looked out the window and saw a squirrel in a tree munching a bright red apple — one of our apples. So, the apples came inside.

On the lower shelf of that table, I had another styrofoam cooler full of pears. I left it there because the squirrels hadn’t been into that yet. I figured it could stay until they discovered it. This wasn’t too smart! Their sleuthing took just three weeks. We found more styrofoam litter all over the porch this week, and several times we found the lid off the cooler. So, no more fruit on the back porch! That is, unless I can find squirrel-proof containers. So I moved the pears into the laundry room, which is the room into which the back porch door opens.

Then I had to re-organize and declutter the laundry room to accomodate the pears. Our laundry room tends to accumulate things ~ things that are headed to the thrift store, garbage that needs to be taken outside, muck boots covered with chunks of the red clay dirt that surrounds us, boxes that need to be broken down. I need to keep up with all of it better.