Hi friends! It’s my birthday, but you get a present of an extra puzzle.

I made this grid in 2022 (and it reflects my gridmaking skills at the time; please excuse the large number of 3-letter entries) but never did anything with it. The theme is, shall we say, not the most impressive achievement of its kind, so I mostly left this puzzle behind to focus on other things.

But, yesterday’s Wall Street Journal puzzle was offensive to a number of people. I get it; see Jim Peredo’s review at Fiend. I really hate the idea of making a puzzle that turns out to be someone’s emotional pothole. Most people do crosswords as a way to have fun, right? Even we speed solvers, although I would not call the way I solve “fun” (it’s more of a compulsion at this point), absolutely do not expect the part of our day we spend solving to involve an emotionally painful memory. And although folks may differ on what would or would not be offensive or hurtful to a reasonable solver (or to a subset of reasonable solvers), I come down on Jim’s side here that a theme centered around a revealer of MISSING CHILDREN is likely enough to be that emotional pothole that I wouldn’t have made the puzzle.

Anyway: I did make this puzzle, which in some ways is the opposite of that WSJ puzzle, and I think you’ll see why I finally decided to clue it and offer it up. I hope it’s emotionally breezy, although I suppose I didn’t clue it super easy.

Middle Child – Across Lite

Middle Child – Solve Online