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The solutions to yesterday's puzzles:

1. PARROT and SPARROW
2. TOOTH and FOOT
3. Pop Goes the Weasel
4. Paris Hilton
5. North East West South
6. Tomato
7. Eagle and Beagle
8. David Letterman
9. Eggnog.
10. Rome Oslo Geneva Athens

Eric Berlin, The Potato Chip Puzzles, YR mystery, Penguin Books

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So I've been here for a few days now and have yet to puzzle you guys in the slightest. Obviously this must change. Let's start easy and work our way up.

Check back tomorrow for the answers!

1. What two birds contain the letter string PARRO?


2. What two body parts are pluralized by changing all of their Os to Es?


3. PPGSTHWSL. What kids' song do you get when you add the right vowels and spaces to this string of letters?


4. PART  FISH  AIL  TONE. If you drop one letter from each word and respace what remains, what celebrity name can you form?
   
   

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So you might be asking yourself—and if not, I’ll ask it for you—what sort of puzzles does a puzzle addict solve?

I shall tell you. Sit down and grab a snack, this is going to take a while.

First and perhaps most obviously, I solve the New York Times crossword puzzle every day. I don’t get the paper itself—I subscribe to the puzzle online for $39.95 a year. I’m not a wicked fast solver, at least not compared to my friends, but I can do the Monday and Tuesday puzzles in less than five minutes. As for the Saturday puzzle, famed for its devilish difficulty, on a real good day I can conquer it in twenty minutes or so. On a bad day—well, we’re talking hours, and I might have to leave a few squares blank.

I used to also solve the New York Sun puzzle, which in every way met or exceeded the quality of the Times crossword. Alas, the Sun has folded, though the crossword editor is trying to bring his puzzle back online.

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So what is it about puzzles, anyway? Why do I solve them every day and why am I working so diligently to convert kids to a lifetime of puzzle love with my Winston Breen books?

There are a few reasons I could throw at you. There’s my general fascination with words, and how they can be bent and shaped and turned into curlicues. Who can fail to adore the fact that the letters of ONE PLUS TWELVE can be scrambled to make the mathematically equivalent sentence, TWO PLUS ELEVEN? Don’t tell me that is not as awesome as a fireworks display.

So there’s that, my ceaseless love of wordplay.

But stronger than that is my love of the Aha! moment.

In my last post, I talked about some puzzles you can create for your kids. What I didn’t say is that your children may not solve them quite as quickly as you created them. They might struggle a little. What you’ve handed them will at first look like nonsense: A bunch of letters all mashed together. Or maybe not even that. The Pigpen code, at first glance, is just a lot of squiggly lines.

Watch your child as he or she tries that first puzzle, which is called an Anaquote. The solver has to scramble the columns of letters so that they spell a message reading across the rows. This may not be an automatic thing for a nine-year-old or a ten-year-old to do. In my sample puzzle, I don’t indicate spaces between the words, and some words start on one line but wrap to the next. That’s not quite how a kid normally reads.

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The last thing I would ever admit is that puzzles are educational. Yes, yes, there are a great many people running around saying that puzzle-solving is a fine way to keep your faculties sharp. There are suddenly any number of “brain training” products and Web sites out there. Old age homes teem with residents solving sudoku and crosswords.

But, jeez, keep all that beneficial stuff on a low volume, would you? I’m working over here, trying to get kids to solve puzzles. I don’t want them equating puzzle-solving with broccoli.

These days I’m puzzling kids mostly through my two books: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen and its brand-new sequel, The Potato Chip Puzzles. (May I mention that they’ve been compared to the Encyclopedia Brown books and also that great puzzle mystery, The Westing Game? Thanks. I’m done plugging now.) I also go to schools and libraries to puzzle the kids face-to-face.

But there is no reason you can’t puzzle your kids yourself, even if you’ve never created a puzzle in your life. Let me show you how.

The next time your child has a birthday, don’t just hand over the present. Make your kid work for it! Create a puzzle hunt that runs through your house, with the present as the treasure waiting at the end.

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Eric Berlin is our guest blogger during the week of April 20th. If you have any questions for Eric Berlin, add a comment to any of his posts.

Here is more information about The Potato Chip Puzzles:

When puzzle addict Winston Breen and his best friends head to an all-day puzzle hunt with a $50,000 grand prize, they're pumped. But the day is not all fun and games: not only do they have a highstrung and highly competitive teacher along for the ride, but the puzzles are hard even for Winston, the other schools' teams are no joke, and someone in the contest is playing dirty in order to win. Trying to stop this mystery cheater before it's too late takes an already tough challenge to a whole other level. . . .

Packed with a variety of fun puzzles to solve, this fast-paced sequel will pull readers right into the action from start to finish.