Ok, so this isn’t a foodie post (sorry!) and I do promise to do more of those. Especially as summer comes around! But today was grey and rainy. Which left me with kids jumping off furniture and onto each other. So we sat down with puzzles. If you have kids, they have puzzles. Ours have 14 of them.
Maybe that doesn’t sound like a huge number, but when you think of it in terms of how many individual puzzle pieces you’re left with- it’s a lot. And when they all get dumped out all over the place, it can be downright overwhelming.
I once blogged about it, but there were no pictures, and not a lot of description, and since we’ve spent the afternoon doing puzzles, I decided to share with you my puzzling system!
Take a puzzle: the board and the pieces.
Turn them all over and write a coordinating number (or letter) on the back!
Boxes get destroyed quickly, so I put them in zip-locks, marked with the corresponding number!
This is awesome on many fronts! First of all, it’s no longer a huge headache to figure out which puzzle goes with what board, or puzzle pieces. And hello, number recognition!? My kids can (5, 3, and 20 months) can look at the back of the puzzle piece and find the bag with the corresponding marking. Teaching, cleaning, organization all in one? You know I love that!
laborofwonder 
Well.. as a foodie (I kinda hate that term but what else can you call it??) I expected to be just a slight bit sad there was no mention of food in here, but it turns out that this post catered to another one of my OCD/control issues. Organization. Smart move marking the backs of the pieces!
glad to hear I’m not alone! My OCD has slowed some in the organizational department since kids… but as they get older, I’m slowly getting it back. My husband wishes we could just have a big bin for all the toys like many of our friends… but even my kids get wide-eyed when he tries to put things just anywhere. But every toy has a special home, Daddy! (love it!) And I’m with you on the foodie… but what else do you call it?!
This is a great tip! I’m going to use it! Thanks!
thanks! Definitely do! It’s such a time saver\ frustration saver for me!