My daughters beat me so badly in The Mini crossword puzzle that I have to believe I'm deteriorating mentally

A few months ago I wrote about the fact that I do four New York Times puzzles every morning (Wordle, Connections, Strands, and The Mini.)

My performance varies from day to day, but generally speaking, I'm OK at Wordle, pretty good with Connections, very good at Strands, and not so good with The Mini.

The Mini is a small crossword puzzle that can usually be completed in about a minute. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower.

I thought I was pretty decent at The Mini until I accepted my daughter Chloe's invitation to create a leaderboard for the game whereby you can compare your performance with other people. We have since added Elissa and Jack to that daily leaderboard.

I quickly realized that either Chloe and Elissa are geniuses at this puzzle, or I'm slow to the point of potential brain dysfunction.

As an example, here was a typical five-day stretch in mid-February comparing how quickly Chloe and I completed The Mini each day:

February 11: Chloe 33 seconds, me 1:07

February 12: Chloe 27 seconds, me 54 seconds

February 13: Chloe 1:05, me 1:29

February 14: Chloe 59 seconds, me 2:29

February 15: Chloe 1:12, me 2:12

In the several weeks since we created our leaderboard, I think I have been faster than my daughters maybe twice each, and those involved lucky guesses on my part.

I know Chloe and Elissa, at 28 and 31, respectively, are in their mental prime, while I (at 55) clearly am not. But still...when you think of yourself as a "Word Guy" and your kids – along with probably nearly everyone else who regularly completes The Mini – leave you in the dust, it's time to question whether you're losing it for good this time.

My only recourse is to assume my kids are somehow cheating. They're highly intelligent, sure, but I can't accept this level of defeat at face value.

I can't figure out the light switches in our house

I've been living in the same house for almost 12 years, but in some ways it still seems new to me.

Like the smell of the basement bathroom, for instance. It's not used that often, and the door is generally closed, so it maintains a certain "new" smell.

And almost the entire upstairs area is relatively unfamiliar to me. All four bedrooms belong to various kids, so the only time I generally go up there is to put Jack to sleep for the night. It's like it's part of my house, but at the same time it isn't.

Then there are the light switches. Altogether, I would estimate we have 300 light switches in our house. Not really, of course, but it seems that way to me. And my wife knows exactly what all of them do.

You probably would, too, if you lived here, because you are at least of average intelligence. I, on the other hand, am quite clearly brain damaged. For more than a decade I've been using the light switches, yet I can't quite tell you which light is controlled by any given switch.

Is that bad? It is, isn't it? I'm thinking it's indicative of some sort of brain defect. I should know, after an entire decade-plus, what each light switch does. But I don't.

The consequence of this is that when it's time to turn out the lights in, say, the living room, I flip a dozen different switches up and down until I hit the right combination. I might manage to darken the room, but at the same time I've turned on every external light we have.

My wife is amused by this, and she understandably can't fathom why this confuses me so much.

Even the three switches in our master bedroom puzzle me sometimes. Terry will ask me to turn on the ceiling fan, and I flip the left-most of the three switches, which does not appear to do anything and could – for all I know – have turned on the neighbors' bathroom light.

(NOTE: I just walked over to the light switches here in our room and flipped that left switch. Turns out it controls a light in the ceiling just outside our bedroom door. Who knew?)

Someday, when I've lost my faculties and I spend my days talking to house plants, you'll all be saying to one another, "Yeah, it all started with the light switches..."

Four teenagers in the family? Yes, sir, may I have another?

In a few weeks, my daughter Melanie will turn 13. When that happens, we will enter a six-month period in which we have four teenagers in our family at one time.

Specifically, our oldest four will be 19, 16, 15 and 13. I will freely accept offers of prayers, happy thoughts, and Prozac.

(SIDE NOTE: "Prayers, Happy Thoughts and Prozac" could be a good name for a band. Or at least the name of an album. I'm going to form a band not so much to make music, but just so we can use that name.)

This stretch of parenting four teens will end fairly quickly because my oldest, Elissa, will turn 20 in March. Twenty is a weird age. It's only a milestone birthday in that you leave one decade of life and enter another, but it doesn't get you anything in the way that ages 18 and 21 bring new freedoms and legal privileges.

I remember being 20. It was a long time ago, like centuries ago, but I remember it. I remember having more hair (and none of it being gray). I remember being able to go directly from a dead sleep into a fast morning run with no need to "warm up." I remember going to college every day and then working 6-8 hours at night and thinking nothing of it.

I also remember regularly making foolish decisions, so I guess you take the good with the bad.

Anyway, on the surface, having four teenagers in the family at the same time would appear to be a nightmare. And it certainly does have its challenges, from the mood swings to the school drama to the brain damage.

Yes, brain damage. Anyone who has parented a teenager, or even dealt with one, will tell you the only way to explain their behavior sometimes is that they must have suffered some sort of cerebral injury.

And indeed, the teen brain really is still under construction, busily forming the connections and functions that serve a person well later in life.

During those years when the contents of a teenager's skull are being built up, they do things that are puzzling to a rational (and even a not-so-rational) adult. You have to roll with this. Guide them, correct them, help them, sure. But in the end, acceptance is a lot easier.

Still, looking at the big picture, it really is a fun adventure when you have teens in the house. Their friends come over a lot, they keep you busy, and they tend to be noisy, irreverent, and altogether a good time.

Which is what I try to remind myself whenever they frustrate me, since it's guaranteed that I will miss the chaos of these years when it's all over.

I'm interested to see how it will play out when little Jack, our youngest at age 7, is a teen. By then, Elissa and Chloe and possibly Jared will presumably be out of the house, and Melanie will be knee-deep in college, leaving Jack to navigate those years with just his parents and a bunch of pets left behind by his siblings.

Being so much younger than the others, his experience of teenager-dom will be a little different than theirs. It will, in fact, be much like mine. My elder three siblings were 16, 14 and 12 when I was born. Which meant that by the time I started school, they were all either out the door or well on their way.

So when I was a teenager, it was just me, mom and dad living together. It couldn't have been nearly as loud and raucous in their house then as it is in mine now.

But I was definitely just as brain damaged, maybe more so, than my own offspring. Some things, it seems, never change.