My kid is detail oriented

Let's talk a little bit about Phook, shall we? You know, since I started this blog to talk about Phook and then went all egomaniac on your asses. Phook, you see, is detail oriented. I have been considering putting up a post on this topic for awhile now, but since I don't really know much about child development, child behaviors, or children, I have feared that I'd be putting up a post describing what every kid in the world does, naively believing it was worth exclamation points. But now I think I see enough of these behaviors that they simply must be worth noting, if only so I can read this when she's 13 (and, puke, her little sibling is going on 12) and leaving shit out all over the bathroom every morning.

So, Phook. It pretty much started as soon as she got some fairly decent skills under her belt in terms of manipulating objects with her hands. Her favorite toy as a 6-monther or whatever was her little set of nesting cups. She would stack and unstack those things forever. Nothing could hold her interest like nesting those things in each other. I know that those things are a recommended toy for that age group, since I was still consuming magazines and books on babies at that point, before I decided that said media sucked rocks and just served to make me worry about my kid's development rather than enjoy it. So her interest there was normal. I'd argue that her focus in the task went beyond the norm, but it doesn't so much matter. And nesting cups will still keep her busy for a bit even now, which is a miracle.

The next major thing I noticed was that Phook enjoyed putting toys (or anything, really) away perhaps even more than playing with stuff. Before she could even walk but could crawl faster than an Indy car racer, maybe around 9 months or so, she had this tendency (which she still has) to whip out her bag of diapers, which we just wedge beside the couch since we usually change her on the living room floor during the day, and pull all the diapers out. After putting 37 diapers back in the sack for the 400th time, I decided I'd "teach" her to help me put them away. Only I didn't have to. I said, "Phook, get me a dipe." And she power-crawled to a dipe, brought it back to me, and shoved it in the plastic bag. And proceeded to do this with an entire bag of diapers, shrieking with glee. The bestest game ever, as far as she was concerned.

As far as playing with blocks or anything that has its own container is concerned, the fun lies in putting the object in the container, dumping it out, and putting it in, repeat, repeat, repeat. At my parents' house, they have a set of the classic little wood alphabet blocks for her. They are stored in a plastic container with a plastic snap-on top which originally held pretzels or something. She will often throw a single block in the container, snap on the lid, remove the lid, throw in one more block, snap on the lid, remove the lid, throw in one more block, repeat, repeat, repeat. Like a little ritualistic thing where the placing of the lid between blocks is important. At times like these, I ponder whether there is such a thing as baby OCD.

The nice thing about this Phook characteristic is that I can make a game out of about anything involving chucking an item into a receptacle. I am currently suffering from winter ailment #623, which is a nice chest cold with a painful cough and an intermittently sore throat. (Seriously, immune system, get over the fact that I am pregnant and help ME out!!!) So yesterday I was feeling highly shitteous and was couchbound for a lot of the day, which has a tendency to anger Phook. But luckily I had a little package of cough drops out. And Phook sat on the couch and dumped them out and put them back in the package for a good half hour with me adding the occasionally sound effect when she dropped them in and occasionally holding one in my teeth by the wrapper and then loudly blowing out and jettisoning it back into the bag. (Desperate times, desperate measures, friends.)

With Phook, there have been a zillion times where I've said something offhand, never thinking she'd understand it and not even addressing it to her directly, and she has shown me that she does indeed know what I'm saying. The wonder of receptive language skills is neverending. Sometime last summer, maybe when she was 11 months or so, I started saying "Can you put that away?" or "Please put that back" in sort of casual terms. And I realized that she immediately knew what I meant. Since then, asking her to put something away or put something back has become more fun than peekaboo for this kid. Of course there are times when she'll stare you down all beady-eyed and openly defy you by walking off with something you've asked her to put away, but by and large, putting stuff away is a game for this kid. Oddly, putting stuff away is a phrase (hell, a concept) that her father doesn't understand at 31 years of age. But Phook loves to put stuff away. She'll empty a drawer and then thoroughly enjoys restocking it. She'll dump out toys and then yelp with happiness as she puts them back. WTF?

In addition to this, Phook has a preternatural understanding of categorization. This manifests itself most insanely as far as our trash management is concerned. In our kitchen, we have a tall garbage can with a lid with a button you press to open it. On the floor next to that is a paper bag into which we put recyclable paper goods. Hanging on a cabinet doorknob to the right of that is a plastic bag into which we put recyclable cans, glass, and plastic. Several months ago, Phook was snacking on some string cheese one afternoon, and after she was done she took off towards the kitchen with the wrapper. Thinking she was either going to try to eat it or shove it in a cat's orifice, I followed her. No. She walked to the garbage can, pulled up the lid, and unceremoniously threw the wrapper away. I swear to you people that despite my general love of tidiness, I never purposefully taught my child the concept of garbage. I don't understand how the toddler mind can just become aware of it, either, but apparently it can. So I kind of wondered if this was a fluke. But the next day, she pulled a piece of tape off of a box that was out, played with it until she had it wadded in a ball, and then walked to the trash and threw away the tape wad. Not a fluke. So a few days later, she was wandering around with a junk mail catalog I'd given her to occupy her for a few minutes, and brought it out into the kitchen, headed toward the trash. I said, "Good job, Phook, that is garbage." And then I muttered under my breath, "But actually, it's recyclable." I turned in Phook's direction and saw at that very moment that my child was putting the catalog in the paper bag designated for such a purpose. Auntie Hode was there. She knows this happened.

Since then, my kid has consistently managed trash of all 3 varieties without parental prompting. Big K has a tendency to guzzle a 2-liter of soda (no, that's not a typo), crush up the bottle, and leave it on the floor. If Phook finds such filth, she will pick it up and put it in the bag containing recyclables of this nature. For Christmas, she got a grocery cart full of play food from the Grandparents J. This included a few little paper foods like a box cake mix and a hamburger helper box. One day I noticed that the cake mix box was missing from the cart. I then found it in the paper recyclables. It had a tear in it. Clearly it was no longer any good to her. A few days ago, I had a little index card with some info on it that I needed. I had been using it for a bookmark in a magazine. I couldn't find it when I needed it, so I looked in the recycling bag. Bingo. It had clearly fallen from my magazine and been recycled by my kid. I just do not know how she can understand these categories and apply them perfectly. I do not know. What I do know is that this is an ass-kicking capability to have in a kid. Because when I'm lazy and trash creates itself in my presence, I can hand it to Phook and say, "Please put that in the garbage." And off to the garbage it goes. Dude.

Then there is her love of orderliness. A few weeks ago, I was in the bathroom and Phook was of course accompanying me. We have a rug outside the tub, and I noticed that a corner of it was flipped up. Apparently Phook did too, because as soon as she saw it she rushed over and flipped the corner back down. Damn rug! She has done this multiple times since with multiple rugs. At lunch time, Phook eats in her high chair, which is right by our kitchen table, and I eat seated at the chair closest to her. After lunch, I clean her up, get her out of the chair, and set her down. She then, without exception, pushes my chair back up to the table where it goes before heading out of the room to play. She just does it. That chair goes there! If I forget to shut the baby gate into our laundry room, no worries. Phook will shut it. Dude. I'm guessing this is some developmentally normal stage (I wouldn't know, since I've sworn off the materials that would tell me) in which the kid is just figuring out how the world works and puts it into practice. But it just seems so odd to watch it. I can't imagine why she would decide it's important to push my chair back to the table before she leaves the room. I mean, she's busy. But she does it. The other weird thing I noticed was that the first day after instituting our new playroom, she knew where everything went on the little individual bookshelves. I've walked in there several times and found her gingerly placing things back in the exact spot I had originally put them. This includes a general shelf of miscellaneous random crap including happy meal toys (ooof, yes, she has a few), her extensive collection of toy cell phones, and other random crap. She will put a tiny toy from this collection back exactly where it had been on the generally disordered shelf. Dude.

Phook is also in the mimic stage. I brush my hair, she gets her brush and brushes hers (and mine). I brush my teeth, she grabs her toothbrush from her drawer and starts brushing hers. (And I have to add that this past weekend she was over at the home of the Grandparents J and they brushed her teeth before bed. And she opened their bathroom cabinet and placed her toothbrush on a shelf there in a location roughly equivalent to where her toothbrush would go in our cabinet at home. She doesn't even let down her guard when she's on the road, man.) But, of course, the thing she has seized on the most is cleaning. I wonder why? The first time we noticed this was a couple months ago. We were at Big K's mom's house, and there was some crud on a white wooden chair in her living room. Big K was changing Phook and so he grabbed a wipe and started cleaning the stuff off the chair. (That fact right there probably should have been a post.) He then left the room momentarily. And Phook grabbed a wipe and started cleaning the chair, with perfect technique. I nearly sharted myself. Now, months later, she's an advanced housekeeper. If I have the broom out, she grabs it and runs around pushing the thing around the floor as soon as I step away from it. This is pretty funny to watch given that it's twice her length. If I'm cleaning anything with a rag, she grabs the rag and mimics my motion as soon as she gets a chance. If she spills something on the floor, she uses her hand to rub at it in a little cleaning motion. But her favorite is the vacuum. For some reason I have a tendency to add "car" to the end of any word describing something that can be put in motion. So sometimes I call her play grocery cart a "cart car" and shit like that. The vacuum is the "vacuum car." So the other day, I said I was going to get the vacuum car out, and she of course excitedly ran to the closet where the item is stored and started banging on the door. So I start vacuuming and she runs in her playroom and grabs this little push toy she has from Grandma N. You push it on its wheels, it plays a merry tune. She starts pushing the thing back and forth like a vacuum. She's done this multiple times since. (As an aside, she also hurriedly brought me the cordless phone that was ringing as I was vacuuming, because I couldn't hear it. Christ, people.) The other day I busted out my new handheld vacuum car to suck up some packing peanut foam type shit (yeah, I asked for this item for Christmas and meant it). She was in love with the mini vacuum car and after figuring out it wasn't going to ingest her, started driving that thing around the floor too.

So, yeah. There you have it. Phook is heavily involved in making sure her world is right. I don't know if this is just a developmental phase or if it is indicative of a real personality trait, but I sure as hell hope it is the latter. Having a neat freak kid seems like an asset. And if that's the case, I'm sure the one I'm gestating will be a filthy hoarder with an actual blindness towards disorder in the very image of his/her father, so I'm gonna need at least one little helper in this house. And even if it's not a longstanding trait in her, I'm just gonna pray that it lasts through the newborn stage with #2, because I could really use another set of hands to put diapers in the garbage. I'll wash them people, don't worry.