I’ve been on a puzzle kick lately. It’s one of the few activities besides doom-scrolling that I can lose myself in, sometimes for hours, and it’s also a project that has a beginning and an end, which is satisfying.

Our family has always loved doing puzzles. From the chunky, wooden, easy to place pieces of the kids’ earliest puzzles through jumbo floor puzzles, to thousand-piece masterpieces we would assemble on our old dining room table, they’ve always been a point of family togetherness.

They’ve allowed the kids to explore and learn things like colors, matching, competitiveness and how to take turns placing that final piece. I also had to learn how to relinquish control over that final piece placement, which believe me, was no small feat.

Doing puzzles also let me observe my kids and learn how they solved problems. One of my biggest “a-ha” moments came when we got a 48-piece floor puzzle of dinosaurs.

A was probably 4 or 5, which mean G was 3 or 4. A eagerly tore into the puzzle immediately, sorting pieces out by edge pieces and by color groups, and had it together within about a half-hour.

Not to be outdone, G demanded that the puzzle be taken apart and he have his turn. The next four hours were long and frustrating for me, as G refused any help, and methodically tried every single piece with every other single piece until he found the one that fit. Then he moved on to the next one.

Kids don’t always learn the lesson that you want them to; sometimes, they’re the ones teaching you, instead. This has always been a moment I’ve remembered forever as learning exactly what it meant to be a parent. Same puzzle, same household, two kids who were only 18 months apart and yet couldn’t have been more different. But, at the end of the day, both got the job done, in their own way and on their own time.

Over the years, as I’ve watched them struggle with various tasks I’ve reminded myself of the puzzle, and tried to stay out of things and let them work it out. Over the years, it seems that the lessons of the puzzle have manifested in different ways. A is still much more likely to sort all his work or issues into like areas and then work through them a chunk at a time.

G, on the other hand, has learned to step back and look at the higher-level view of the end result and then build a plan to get there. While he is no longer quick to start shoving pieces that don’t match together, he’s not afraid to try something a few different ways.

Last summer, as he tried to build a set of steps in the backyard, on top of extremely rocky soil, his final version contained three different approaches to building a step, each one adapted to the surface underneath it.

G and E haven’t exactly jumped on my recent puzzle obsession, but each of them will occasionally wander through the TV room where I have my latest project on the coffee table.

I’ve discovered that working on puzzles is almost as good as being stuck in the car on a long drive: Conversation is bound to happen. Their competitive side is also still going strong, as they’ve come home from school to find that I’ve finished a puzzle, and they’ve been irritated that I didn’t wait for them.

One of the last puzzles that I did had huge swaths of plain green areas, and I was left with no choice but to take the original G approach and start to try every piece in every hole. Coincidentally, G showed up while I was in the home stretch, and it quickly became a race between us to see who could fill in more of the spaces. Watching his giant, now manly hands fly over the pieces, I got a little teary eyed remembering his pudgy little fingers fumbling with those jumbo pieces so long ago.

In a lot of ways, our lives have become a puzzle, one that’s forever missing a piece. These last few years have been a lot of trial and error, forcing the wrong pieces to fit together, looking at them, knowing they’re wrong. But not having any other options, we just ignore it and keep sticking pieces together.

I guess I keep hoping that G’s approach of trying every piece out to see what fits together, even when they clearly don’t look like they’re going to, is just one more things my kids have taught me.

Liz Pinkey’s column appears on Saturdays in the Times News