a puzzling weekend!!

this weekend was a rainy and dreary weekend---plus, i had a ton of housework that had been neglected....we'll just blame it on the holidays.....so we had a lazy little weekend! my dad had bought for our family a 550 piece jigsaw puzzle that the boys had been dying to open up, but i had kept putting them off because i knew shawn and i would be the one's staying up late..using every spare moment to finish up this little booger. finally on saturday afternoon, dear ol' mom had run out of excuses---so we opened up the puzzle and started in!! grady's first comment was, "wow, these are tiny pieces....just like my thomas puzzle!" well, not exactly like the thomas puzzle, i added.....just like the thomas puzzle except about 450 extra pieces!!!! so the boys and i diligently plodded through all 550 pieces looking for the flat edged pieces....once we got through that, we had lost our littlest helper....."this is too hard!!" about the time we had 10 pieces together...making real headway...shawn came home from a quick jaunt by work and a funeral-excitement!- and started asking why would i have opened that up now...it is going to take forever!! me, being the glass half full kind of gal was like, "oh no, we've only been working on it for 30 minutes and look how good we're doing!" ha! so, much to shawn's dismay he joined the puzzle process.....a little insight to the last time shawn and i did a puzzle together....it was 10 years ago and our tv had broken down, we had sent it to be repaired and one of us - unsure who??- decided to go buy a couple of puzzles for us to do in the evening!! it seemed like a grand plan until we figured out that a left-handed person and right-handed person not only think in different directions they also put puzzles together differently! shawn likes to work on an area and piece together and place pieces where they will eventually go and i on the other hand work where the pieces take me over here, over there----needless to say we annoyed each other! after that we decided to keep the puzzles for other couples....we had plenty of other stuff in common!! so 10 years later, here we are again...we somehow lost our 2 little helpers pretty early on, so it was up to the two us!! the first night we stayed up until about 11:30 working on the puzzle, and we were nowhere close to being done, so right after church we got started again, and i am happy to report last night at 9:15 we placed the last piece in----after we found the elusive last piece under the couch!! we are numbering the back of this puzzle, as we will never be doing this one again, but want some sort of proof that we actually were crazy enough to finish it once!!! and it also seems that shawn and i have meshed even more over 10 years, while i still flit from one area to another and shawn still painstakingly works in one area....i no longer get annoyed by the little pieces laying about and he doesn't seem to mind me putting a piece or two together in his area...my how we've grown! we are so happy that one day,40 years from now, we will be able to sit on the front porch, yelling at people driving too fast, putting together a puzzle!