While I was in Singapore with Bhavana and Abhishek (who is now 3 years, 4 months), I bought a 63-piece jigsaw puzzle for Abhishek. It had all kinds of ‘transportation vehicles’ in there — aeroplanes, cars, buses, vans, boats, and so on. And the pieces were nice and large. Abhishek has been doing the jigsaw puzzle daily for the past few weeks! And that’s bored me no end, since he only focuses on the road vehicles, and has me do the air and water ones.
So, in our hunt for more jigsaw puzzles, I discovered ten of them — from my childhood. My mom had kept all of them in storage. And in a day, Bhavana and I were having competitions at night doing the puzzles. They range from 150 pieces to 1500 pieces. Some of them are going to take a few days to do, given that neither of us can spend more than an hour or two daily on them.
As I started doing the tougher puzzles, memories of my days from my teens doing these puzzles started coming by. It was something I would enjoy a lot (along with listening to BBC’s World Service on my shortwave radio). Jigsaw puzzles have an amazing attraction — building the picture piece by piece, using a mix of luck and logic. I am doing one 300-piece puzzle now which has a picture of 2 kittens. It looked fairly trivial when I started, but now I think I will be spending quite a few hours on it!
What started as a toy for Abhishek has now me engaged. Abhishek knows how to find the “edge pieces” – and he has his mother’s eagle eyes. Now, if only, I can delegate the “integration” activity to him…!
