Have you ever watched children do a jigsaw puzzle?
They all attack it differently: some concentrate on the piece shapes, some focus on colors or images, some look for edge pieces, …
But …
when the puzzle gets dumped out of the box, and before most of the pieces are turned over, there is usually one overly excited kid who grabs the first 2 pieces he or she can get their hands on and tries to join them.
The child is always extremely surprised when they don’t fit together and then carries on by grabbing 2 more random pieces.
That kid is the eternal optimist in the bunch.
Life hasn’t made him or her methodical or calculating yet.
I like that;
… and the puzzles last a lot longer too!
note: I’m an “edge pieces first” person. Thanks for asking.
double note: If you’ve got 5 corners, something’s wrong.
triple note: the top puzzle is my next project!
quadruple note: You may think it’s strange, but I don’t like crossword puzzles. A good “word jumble” is nice though.
quintuple note: I wrote about puzzles a long time ago. (before “notes“, “humorblog” links, and medium sized photos even)
I Am The Cheese 
So you’re saying I can’t just dump out the pieces and put them randomly together? My mom always said it didn’t look like the box because I was being unique.
And Sweetiegirlz actually thought about you at Christmas when I was looking at Jigsaw puzzles here. haha. Do you glue your puzzles at the end and hang them up? Because I would think that like reading a book more than once, doing a jigsaw puzzle more than once would be kind of anti-climatic.
Edges first all the way. That looks like an awesome puzzle. My Mum has one what doesn’t show what the puzzle picture is. The photo on the box is a bunch of people looking at something and the puzzle is what they are looking at. It was very hard to put together. Also very hard to describe. OK. I’m going now…
Thanks for the comments.
designacure: thanks for stopping by. Your mom sounds very patient. You probably had trouble finding frames to put the completed puzzles in too!
sweetiegirlz: I put my puzzles back in the box afterwards; I’m into recycling. I only do puzzles once, but if there was a serious puzzle shortage in the world I’d do the same one twice.
S. Le: Those are the ones I do: WASGIJ puzzles.
You can do the same puzzle a second time if you turn all the pieces over to the blank side.
pannonica: that’s like turning your underwear inside out for another week’s use without washing them!
Great idea!!!
I’m going to veto that analogy.