Hi fellow Edders,

Today I wanted to stop by to share one of the new trends in our house: puzzle books!

Puzzle Books Galore

If someone thinks I should blur the pictures because they show the full puzzle, let me know! I wasn't sure.. doing a web search I saw some pages shown so I don't know if it's acceptable to show a small number of the pages to display the point.. hard to say these days!

The educational journey of the little man has certainly taken twists and turns. We are getting better at learning how he handles and processes things once we sought professional help and learned there were some challenges going on.

While we are working through those, nothing serious thankfully, one of the things that we happened to stumble upon was learning that my son absolutely loves to do puzzle books! I should have known he would take right to it, he was always really good and interested at doing the mazes in the kids magazines that we would get and would immediately dive into them so he could do them. We would do the occasional puzzle but a lot of them are word related instead of picture. We got a picture puzzle book recently though and he has taken to it like a bee to honey!

I will say that I am a little jealous that these Highlights books didn't exist in this manner when I was a kid hahaha. I always remembered looking at the Highlights books in doctors offices, dentists and other places that I would have to go as a kid. I would immediately go over to the puzzles and hope that somebody didn't use a pen or pencil to highlight all of the pictures.

With the little man, he has been obsessed with these puzzle books! We have been trying to get him off technology, for various reasons and we weren't able to do a great job removing him from it because of how addicting the damn stuff is. Thankfully we ended up going cold turkey and getting rid of the tablet which was a struggle for a day or two but he's got all kinds of toys like LEGO and lots of other things around the house. He figured out what to do with his time but what really made it stick was having these picture puzzle books in the house.

We have been really excited that he is using these because they are a great learning tool, they exercise your brain to look a little abstract and train you to not just see things in a very isolated and structured way that words would. I know that cross-word puzzles are good themselves, because they flex the brain in different ways but the little man isn't quite reading yet so we haven't been able to progress to those but I know he will certainly do that in the future.

It has become a morning and nightly routine to pull out the puzzle book and try to solve a puzzle or two before we either get up for the day or we wind down and go to bed. The bedtime routine one is great because although I would be reading to him every night normally, he hasn't been paying attention to the books as much these days as he used to. I guess he was getting bored of them, which in some ways I can sympathize with haha. We needed to figure out something else though and the puzzle books really nailed it!

We usually get a good 45 to 60 minutes of puzzle time every night! That may seem like a lot but doing these small steps like this are one of the best things that we have been able to do when it comes to helping flex and train his little brain. He has sadly been struggling to read and that's causing him a lot of frustration which mounts when we aren't able to properly help him so seeking the professional help has been a great step, we are seeing some improvements for sure and helps ease our anxiety around the topic.

With the lack of concrete reading though, we were afraid that he would be falling behind in other areas because he's mostly playing and running around which is good in the younger ages but it's becoming more of a challenge as he's getting older. The puzzles may not necessarily be what many would consider education but we think that it's an important element of the development of the brains as it activates and flexes different parts of the brain that don't always get a lot of attention these days, creativity and abstract thinking.

As time has gone on with the puzzles, the more he does the faster he is finding the pictures! In the beginning he would find an item every 30 or 45 seconds but now that he's doing them multiple times per day, and these books are pretty damn big, he is finding them in a few seconds once we start a new page and has completely solved a few pages with minimal help from me! I've even seen him beat me in terms of speed and recognition of the images that are selected lol it's remarkable to watch!

I've certainly been having fun where possible in these non-standard types of educational adventures I'm having with my son!

^-CmplXty. _{Real human written content, never AI.}

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