Thursday, January 18, 2018

Mom's "Last" Gift to Michael

My mom was a gift giver. Gifts were her love language - gifts and cards. She loved wrapping them as well. She planned all year long for Christmas. She often bought things at end of the year sales and held them for the following year.

Now that we are in a home where we are fairly certain we'll stay - in other words there won't be surprise orders to move and we aren't living in an RV - we find ourselves seeing great merit in squirreling things away for a later date. I bought a ton of wrapping paper for .61 a roll. Our immediate family of five, hasn't had Christmas yet, but we have plenty of paper for when we do. LOL

We all got Christmas gifts from Mom on Christmas day. Even though she was fighting with cancer, she was determined to get the gifts mailed to Alaska. She didn't make it, but I was able to bring the gifts back with me - we love Alaska Air Club 49!!!! None of us had the money, the time, or the heart to do a lot of shopping....but we had Mom's gifts. I'll post more about that later...it's still a surreal time for me.

Years ago, mom discovered that Michael and a couple of our kids loved puzzles. Each year she worked to find one more difficult or unique than the year before. This was her final gift to Michael....
Dakota, Bre and Gideon watch as Michael is introduced to this year's challenge

This is an AMAZING puzzle. It's in the shape of a leaf....there are NO straight edges....not one. In case that wouldn't be hard enough many of the pieces were odd shapes...a cat, a moon, a sun, a wheelbarrow...you get the idea. Izaak brought a card table in and he, Jamin, Nolan and Michael set to work it.  

After the first night, Nolan and Michael did most the work on the puzzle. 


Krista and I covered it in Modge Podge....OF COURSE we would save the last puzzle mom gave Michael...Michael is holding the EXTRA puzzle piece they found in the box! LOL

We have several puzzles we're ready to hang on the wall in the game room/family room, which right now is more like CoRielle's living room.....

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