The Missing Piece

One tradition that Kim and I have started for conference weekend is a puzzle. We get it out during the sessions and assemble to the best of our ability. We have done several now, usually ranging in size from 500 to 1000 pieces. The kids play bingo and do worksheets to stay busy and quiet (supposedly) and we do the puzzle to stay awake. The puzzle of choice this last weekend was a 500 piece puzzle featuring the Sequoia National Park in California. Very pretty picture and it was only 500 pieces so we thought it would be fairly easy to get done in the 8 hours that we had dedicated to its progress. Well, we did finish it, but only after much obsession and some help from Brenna last night. We worked on it through all the conference sessions and then also late into the night on Sunday and then late into the night last night. It was a beast to put together! Lots of green trees and forest - not much fun to try and place. The most frustrating part was finally getting to the end and then discovering that we were missing a piece! We searched high and low, even pulling out a flashlight to search under the table and chairs. Nothing. We had also vacuumed over the weekend, so we emptied the contents of the vacuum to see if we had accidentally sucked it up. Nope. Sadly this has happened to us before - the last time was a 1000 piece puzzle and we ended up short 1 piece! It had taken us a month or more to put together, so I was not going to just let it go. With that puzzle, I actually emailed the company and had them send me a new puzzle. I thought that I'd just find the missing piece in the new box and we'd have a fix for the problem. Well it was all great in theory until I discovered that they don't cut all puzzles the same, even if it's the same picture. So, we ended up cutting out a similar piece to use in it's place. Months later when we were packing up our house to move, I ended up finding the missing piece...ugh. I'm not quite that obsessed with this last attempt, so we'll just keep an eye out for the missing piece and hope it shows up. If not, life moves on and there will be a new puzzle to attempt in 6 months.