Man with a plan

I'm pretty sure I have, at various times, claimed every baby stage to be my favorite. The newborn stage was my favorite, the three-year-old stage was my favorite, the early twos were my favorite.

I was wrong every time. I'd forgotten how much I loved the just-turned-one stage. This is my favorite.

Jacob is into everything. He wants to know, he wants to explore, he wants to touch and learn and do. This is making my job increasingly difficult, particularly when he wants to know what's on the third bookshelf, or wants to explore my tupperware cabinet, or wants to touch those long blonde curls sprouting from his sister's head.

He could walk if he wanted to. He really could. He just hasn't really seen the need yet. So he'll stand up and sling his big walker in one direction or another before slamming it down and cruising around behind it for a few laps through the kitchen. He'll stand to drink his sippy cup without realizing what he's doing, until he gets to those last few sips that require him to tip the cup upside down, causing him to lean too far back and tip over.

He loves to push his sister's doll stroller through the upstairs bedrooms, but he prefers to push it backwards for better leverage. This drives Abby, my little control freak, absolutely insane. There is a right and a wrong way to push a stroller, and she cannot fathom why anyone would ever turn the thing around and do it wrong on purpose.

"He's just a baby," she reminds me. "Maybe he doesn't know any better."

Seeing that we have far too many trucks in our living room, Jacob has assigned himself a daily mission of choosing one at a time from the truck box, driving it to the stairs, then hauling it upstairs where he drives it down the hallway and hides it in his room. Ascending the steps one-handed is no easy feat, and in the time it takes him to get all the way up and then for me to bring him back down, Caleb has usually retrieved most of the hidden trucks and put them back in their proper place downstairs. This creates a loop that can often last most of the morning.

But one of my one-year-old's favorite activities is playing with blocks. He seems to have figured out that if he destroys whatever they're constructing, Abby and Caleb will make him his own pile of blocks somewhere out of the way. With these blocks all to himself, he's perfectly happy to sit and stack and unstack and knock over and rebuild again and again.

Much like Abby and her books or Caleb and his trucks when they were his age, this seems to be Jacob's go-to activity. When we go out, I make sure to pack a few blocks in my purse to keep him occupied. The area around his carseat is littered with discarded blocks that he managed to sneak into the car right under my nose.

Between the intense focus, the penchant for building things, and the lack of communication, I think I might have a budding engineer on my hands.