2 years, 10 months.

Dear Jack,

As you approach the age of 3, I can see how logic and detail are becoming more relevant in your life.

There is now such a thing as reason and you are beginning to make decisions based on it.

Sunday afternoon I layed down next to you in the living room as you played with your cars and trucks.

And by “play,” I mean that you carefully parked them all along one edge of the blanket, in order of length, from what I could tell.

Then, once they were all perfectly lined up, you reparked them along another edge of the blanket, but the rule was that each one have to be removed in reverse.

You spent like 30 minutes doing this.

The whole time, you never revealed to me what the rules were, instead only telling me, “I got to park my cars.”

Other than that, you barely said a word, being surprisingly self-contained and self-sufficient.

Now that you can sing your ABC’s and successfully count to 10, I believe that finding order in things is important to you.

You want to find a place for everything. You want to organize the chaos.

So that means that playtime sometimes meansorganizing-and-categorizing-time.

Hopefully you won’t end up with some of the weird ticks I did when I was a kid, like “skiing on and jumping over” the power lines by biting my teeth together while riding in the car.

(I hope that example makes sense to… anyone at all!)

Or making sure my bedroom lights were turned off by tapping the switch three times. (As if that makes any sense either!)

I eventually overcame the power of my superstitions, but it wasn’t easy. It was nearly as rough as trying to give up a caffeine addiction.

So maybe you’re not actually developing OCD… but as I look at these pictures, I sort of wonder.

Even if you were a bit OCD, I’d say that’s a good thing.

I’d rather you be slightly obsessed with trying to control things instead of passively letting them control you.

 

Love,

Daddy