I have a confession:

I like to do puzzles.

I also have a shocking revelation to share with you:

Doing any kind of puzzle that requires the use of the table for more than five minutes with children under the age of five in the house is, um… impossible.

Two days ago I walked into my home office/guestroom/craftroom/excerciseroom and found puzzle pieces all over the floor.  I recognized the puzzle as one I had never completed, yet attempted several times, and began picking up the pieces and putting them back in the box.  As I filled the box, I noticed it was getting rather full, and there were still a lot of pieces to be put in there. 

What the?

I noticed puzzle number two.

Crap.

I had been intermingling the tiny pieces of two separate 1000 piece puzzles.  The first thought that came to my mind was, I could totally put together these puzzles to figure out which pieces belong to which puzzle.  And then I had rational thoughts.

Lets talk time versus money.

As a Mom, I make approximately no money for my time working, but my time is still valuable.  If I paid someone else to my job, it would be a lot.  For practical purposes, and to make myself feel good, let’s say I am worth about mmm, $100 an hour.  To put together a 1000 piece puzzle takes let’s say, 10 hours.  (forget the fact that like I said earlier, it’s impossible anyway with small children, but we’re being theoretical right?)   If I were to put together the dollar store puzzle with the idea in my head that I spent good money on it, blah blah, I would make, in theory 10 cents an hour.  But we know it would take a lot more time to do both puzzles, especially not knowing which pieces belonged to which puzzle, so….

That would be like earning a tenth of a cent an hour.

And we know I am worth at least 100 dollars per hour.

We threw the rest of the puzzle pieces in the trash, and I feel strangely liberated.  It was going to be like 20 years before I got around to putting those together anyway.