Puzzles

Being a mother requires the ability to put together unusual puzzles.

You start off simple, poring over and analyzing every word on the directions to the pregnancy test. What does one line mean? What do two mean? Did I do it right? Is that a faint pink I see or am I just imagining it.

Then you jump to a super advanced puzzle. The re-assembly of a newly washed car seat. Difficulty level: 10. Heaven forbid your little precious should spill ketchup while eating french fries in the van, or that they should barf. It's inevitable, you will eventually have to take that thing apart and wash it and then pull out your hair putting it back together.

There are the obvious puzzles involved in parenting. Little wooden ones with pictures of animals and numbers, then later 250, 500, and 1,000 piece puzzles. The kind you set up the card table for. The kind that toddlers love to ruin.

But yesterday I attempted a new kind of puzzle in my mothering journey. The challenge? Inserting football pads into football pants. The seventh grade football season has begun and after two weeks of practice, the pants finally left their home in the locker to be de-grass stained for the first game. I'm sure once they left the locker room, they breathed deeply of the fresh air, no longer surrounded by the stench of pubescent seventh grade boy sweat. I hit them hard with the Oxy-Clean and once they were clean I realized that they needed to be reassembled. A belt and seven interestingly shaped pads were involved and I won! Another puzzle conquered.