A job to do

He gets it from his dad.

My nearly three-year-old can't stop thinking. And once he's thought of something, he has to try it out, and tweak it, and perfect it. There's hardly a moment of the day when he's not in motion, physically, and I know his brain is working double overtime behind the scenes.

It must be exhausting to be him.

Give him any set of random objects, and he'll find something to do with them. Something that involves small-scale construction, most likely, and something that will move his cars and trucks from one place to another more efficiently.

Little brother stole the ramps for his bridge? Not a problem. He tried an innumerable array of possibilities before settling on using alternate parts of the train track to do the job. (Caleb's not one to try the most obvious solution first, and he's not a huge fan of simple solutions. The more complicated a fix, the better, in his little world.)

To get to this arrangement, he went through cups, books, pillows, blocks, and even tried balancing one end of the bridge on his sister's leg. (She wouldn't hold still, so he moved on.)

He's calm, methodical, and precise. He's not easily frustrated by failure, but seems to file each unsuccessful try away in his mind for future use on some other problem.

And in his mind, the task at hand is the only important thing. Lunch and a screaming brother couldn't distract him from his job. He wasn't stopping until Mater made it over that bridge, and in exactly the right way.

Now if only he could channel that determination into some Stop Running in the House efforts, we'd be all set.