while odin long ago mastered simple and complex shape sorting, the elmer 2-sided puzzle has represented a Grand Challenge to his pattern recognition shape matching skills. but today after a long day at work i walked in the door to hear kris exclaim, “odin, show poppi what you learned today!”

“okaaaaaay!”

“see, puzzle.” he said as he took the pieces out of the box as we’ve done many times before. only this time instead of asking for “help. pease.” he proceeded to provide instructions on how to put the puzzle together. he ruminated over each piece while repeating “purple border” as he carefully flipped each piece piece over to reveal the most recognizable distinguishing characteristic between the two sides of the puzzle.

and then after a few minutes of putting the pieces together while describing how you must turn the pieces methodically to get them to fit just right, he looked up with no small amount of pride at the results of his hard work and simply said, “see poppi, puzzle finished.”

maybe next week we’ll try to tackle the new york times crossword puzzle.