Today was Derek’s official first day of preschool, and it surprisingly did not start off well. For months on end, we heard nothing but “I wanna go to school….when can I go to school?”….etc from him. But then right before he had his “try it out – discovery day” at school back in January, he started saying that he didn’t want to go. So we kind of dropped it for a while. Then as scheduled, he started this morning. We…
Happy 2014 everyone! The year is off to a good start as I have been lucky enough to get in a little bit of puzzling time this week. Cole is sleeping through the night most nights so I’ve been getting a little more sleep lately which certainly helps with enabling me to get in some puzzling time once in a while. I haven’t posted new progress pictures in quite some time I know, so here are the latest and greatest….
They were both Christmas presents for my son, Derek this year. He desperately wants to help me with my Life puzzle, but Mommy is still a little gun shy on letting him help with that one just yet. So, instead we worked on two puzzles together this week. The first one, a Peanuts theme featuring Snoopy was 35 pieces, and almost made me want to go camping – not quite though! LOL The other one, Spiderman with friends and foes,…
Hello to all of Penny’s readers! My name is Matthew, I’m the writer and researcher for Puzumi. We’re a puzzle company that prides itself on creating puzzles that help people train their brain, sharpen their skills and let folks have fun while doing this! A big focus of mine of late has been looking at how puzzles impact children during their development. From their earliest moments when they begin using puzzles that are simple cutouts of basic shapes, to more…
Conversation with my almost 4-year-old son yesterday, “Mommy, can I have a piece of candy?” “Sure, Derek. Get one piece out of your Halloween bowl.” A minute later, “Mommy, look….a puzzle piece!” What?! My missing piece from Kevin Sloan’s The Messenger has been found! I wonder how it got in Derek’s Halloween stash?! It’s wood so I don’t think it would have tasted too much like 100 Grand bar. Hmmmm…….
Earlier this week, I was contacted by Mike from the Jigamajoy Company of Pine Brook, New Jersey, who has created a very unique product that combines standard playing cards and jigsaw puzzles into a really interesting puzzling experience. A few formats have several different ways to solve each puzzle and some even have math questions to help kids put the puzzle together correctly. Huh? Who would have thought of combining these two seemingly unrelated aspects of “gaming”, but it seems…
In my last post I mentioned that I was getting my first wooden jigsaw puzzle, entitled The Messenger by Kevin Sloan. What I didn’t say at the time, as I hadn’t yet received the puzzle, was that I was contacted by Artifact Puzzles and given the opportunity to choose any puzzle I wanted (up to a generous pre-set price) and they would send it to me absolutely free of charge. Of course I was very skeptical at first because it sounded too…
I get a lot of catalogs. Catalogs for clothes…catalogs for kids stuff…catalogs for things I would never buy in my lifetime. However, catalogs for home decor are my favorite I have bought more home decor stuff through catalogs than any other catalog item. Most of the time I just glance at them and toss because I just can’t buy everything I like or I’d have to move out of my house to make room for all the stuff!. LOL But…
Last week I found out about a relatively new puzzling company that makes high quality, wooden jigsaw puzzles. I have never tried a wooden puzzle up to this point because they’ve always been so expensive. It’s just cost prohibitive for me as it takes me so long to get to a new puzzle with the Life puzzle still under construction. However, this company, Artifact Puzzles, has some pretty reasonable prices. I like several of their puzzles, including Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs and Kevin Sloan’s…
I have had this blog for over three years now and I am finally starting to actually look into optimizing the blog to gain more followers. It is simply amazing to me how much thought and work goes into making a blog successful. There are so many ways you can go about increasing your followers that it can be a little bit overwhelming. So this week I have been doing a bunch of research on best ways to do this….