Finishing a 1,000 piece puzzle sounds easy enough, right? I chose this as my first goal to complete because I thought this would be an easy way to check one thing off my list. I even had a puzzle already!

Then I opened the puzzle box. A 1000 piece puzzle is A LOT of puzzle pieces. At this point, I had a five year old and was very used to 50 piece puzzles that take ten minutes to finish. Son’s puzzles have big pieces. Opening the box of the 1,000 piece puzzle and pouring out the pieces was daunting. The pieces are so small. Tiny. Miniscule.

I started sorting the pieces into piles – the outside border pieces and the inside pieces. Have I mentioned that 1000 pieces is a lot of pieces? Just sorting took an hour. Then another few hours to construct the border, but it was missing two pieces. This immediately had me concerned – was this puzzle missing pieces or did I miss two outside pieces in the sorting process? I decided that I didn’t care and wasn’t about to lose the hours I worked, so I continued. Well, not right away, I took one look at the remaining 800+ inside pieces and called it a day.

Then a week went by and I looked at it again and started sorting by color. Have I mentioned how many 1000 pieces is? Because it’s A LOT. And at some point in the sorting process, I realized that I had a sad little white pile and two giant green and blue piles. It wasn’t much help to sort by color.

At some point, I actually started to try to fit pieces into the puzzle and amazingly started to find some that fit. The sky was taking shape. Then some rocks took shape. Then a little mountain range in the distance was put together. In life, these things would be GINORMOUS (it’s a word, trust me), but they took up a very small portion of the puzzle. It was disheartening. Every once in awhile I made some progress, but mostly I felt like this task was never going to be completed.

Eventually I made more and more progress but also decided that I mainly wanted to finish to be rid of this task. Why did I even put it on my list? Who cares about a stupid puzzle? Am I really going to turn forty and look at a picture of a completed puzzle and be proud of myself? Who has time to sit down and do this? Why is this on my list of forty things to do before I’m forty? I work full-time and have a kid and a husband and lots of $hit going on. This is the kind of task to do when I’m retired. This is leading me nowhere. But it was on the list, so I decided to just focus and do it and get it done.

So I spent the next few weeks working on the puzzle at night while watching tv. I definitely lost weeks to this puzzle. I have no idea how many hours it took to complete, but it was A LOT. And while I did eventually find the missing two pieces of the border (happiness!!!), I realized when I ran out of blue pieces and there was still a piece missing in the middle of the sky that I was indeed missing at least a few pieces. However, at this point, I didn’t care. I was not starting over!

So I finally finished. I took lots of breaks from the puzzle, and in the end, it probably took me about six months to finish. I was super happy to have finished the first goal I set out to achieve! But maybe not the most satisfying goal. The puzzle sat there with its six missing pieces for a few weeks and then I put it away.