Time seems to be moving at light speed these days. Days and even months move faster than I could ever have imagined. It is hard to believe that today Nolin is 17 months old. When you are young you feel like you can’t grow up fast enough, but as I am getting older I feel like I am speeding towards a brick wall and can’t apply the brakes quickly enough.
Nolin now changes daily as he is quickly developing his own unique little (actually big is probably a better description) personality. If it were up to me I am sure that I would not have any clue as to what milestones Nolin should be achieving. Luckily I get an email every month saying your child is now 17 months this is what you should expect. What I have learned though is that in being a parent you really shouldn’t expect anything.
Thankfully I have Jenn. She has a lot more experience in working with kids, so she has a better idea of what to be looking for. At this point I don’t think we have anything to be concerned about and it is just cool to watch the process taking place.
When he was younger, we purchased some stackable cups in the hopes that one day Nolin would be able to check stacking things off his list. The only thing he has found useful about the cups is the ability to fill them up with water in the tub and dump it on his head as he laughs…yeah not much stacking going on there.
So Jenn has been looking for a while to purchase some actual blocks, this way they may have a chance to be used for stacking and (unless he is very resourceful) not be used for dumping water on himself. Recently while Jenn was out, she finally found blocks that she liked. Now Nolin can finally start working on this developmental milestone….best investment ever!
Not because Nolin is a future architectural genius. Quite the opposite actually. He didn’t initially have any interest in stacking blocks, but he sure does love to bring them down and not in an orderly unstacking sort of way, but more of a demolition derby manner.
As soon as he sees blocks going up, his eyes light up, and his feet start moving (typically faster than the rest of his body) as he charges them, knocks them over and laughs in pure delight.
We quickly gave up on trying to show Nolin the process of stacking blocks because it was clear that he had no interest in stacking but only in destroying. He has found that blocks are his new favorite pastime. Oddly enough, I have too. Apparently I never evolved from this period in my life because I found that I actually quite enjoy stacking blocks. When Nolin lost interest, I would gravitate back to his toys and see what type of structure I could make with the available blocks.
The only problem with my new pastime is that if I was lucky enough to get a decent block structure up, Nolin would run right through it. There was no protecting my masterpieces or stopping Nolin from making sure I didn’t even get that far.
One night it was just Nolin and I at the house, and I came to peace with the fact that Jenn would never walk through the front door, see my work of block art and feel lucky to be married to a guy who could build an entire block city out of 60 cardboard blocks. So I moved onto playing with some of Nolin’s cars, and that is when I turned around to find Nolin (calmly) walking over to the blocks and beginning to stack them on his own. No prompting, no encouraging him to do it, just a boy and his blocks.
Now don’t get too excited, I don’t think he was too concerned with our ability to put a check mark on his developmental growth chart. Instead, I think he figured that if I wasn’t going to stack blocks for him to knock over, he would have to do it on his own. So as soon as he got about 4-5 blocks stacked…BOOM he announced as he demolished them and laughed. And the process repeated.
Our Modern Family 