Every time I hear someone talking about fidget toys and sensory toys and kids these days and their neurodiversity and how in *my* day (or I catch myself self-talking that way about my own fidgets) I remember that we have in the attic five boxes full of twiddle puzzles inherited from previous generations of my family.

Anyway since I was up the attic yesterday anyway, as my reward for having made serious progress on the sitting room I pulled down the box with all the Rubik's/'twisty puzzle' variants and filled up my twiddle toys shelf (There are still four more boxes of puzzle/twiddle toys up there I didn't tackle, but that one had most of the 'twisty puzzle' style ones.)



( More or less top-to-bottom, left-to-right )

As you can probably tell, I have not *super* prioritized solving them, because once they are solved you can't twiddle them anymore. (Also figuring out how to solve them on your own is half the fun, but I do it in a solely tactile way - my fingers and spatial brain, do all the thinking, there's no verbal or visual part - that is *also* half the fun because there are very few intellectual things I process that way. But it means that unless I then immediately sit down and keep doing it until it's in muscle memory I forget.)

(In my middle school original fantasy world, one of the princesses was 'autistic', although this being the early '90s I didn't really understand much about what that meant except what was in Young Wizards and Three of a Kind, but I remember thinking that most of the stereotypical 'autistic' interests didn't make sense for someone living in 14th century Doggerland, so instead she always had a puzzle toy at hand, just like in Dad's collection. In retrospect....)

Anyway now I now longer have an excuse to keep wanting to buy new fidget toys, I have plenty of my ancestral ones readily accessible <_< (we won't talk about all the fiddly handcraft tools I inherited from the other side ok)