"Organization..."

So the fun part of having a three year-old is all the conversations I get to have with him! I know the last post was a conversation Half-pint and I had about "tereal". Tonight we had a conversation about organization. If you know my Half-pint, you will know that he likes things just so! He has always liked things just so. He is a master of lining his cars and trucks (or anything that lines up) up in near perfect rows and stacking anything he can find in very neat towers. Here are a few examples of his talents...keep in mind he was 16-18 months old when these pictures were captured!

So back to the organization conversation...Half-pint was looking at my to-do list and asked me what the list items said. I got to the last one and it had the word "organization" in it. He looked at me and said

"What dat mean???" (he didn't say organization so I'm not sure how to spell it in Half-pint).

"It means everything has a special place...everything is just right. You are organized."

So this little snippet of conversation is fairly meaningless until you hear the rest of the concurrent activities...we were working on a count-down calendar. I copied a page from my calendar and colored out the boxes that didn't apply and then let Half-pint cross out the days as we count down. So I handed him the marker and told him to

"put a big X in this square."

"X? X marks the pot!" (that's what he always says when he hears/sees and x.)

So then he proceeds to color in the entire box, but he only got about 3/4 of the box actually covered with bright orange ink. I think, Okay, that's fine. We had a few days to fill in because I was a few days late in making the calendar, so I had him x-out the next couple of squares. He colored in the next few, but only got about 2/3 of the boxes filled. I told him that he did a great job and tried to put the calendar away for the evening. He was finishing a pre-bed pbj and while he was taking a monster bite and shoving the rest of the crust into his little mouth, I asked him if I could hang the calendar on the fridge. He quickly shook his head no, but his mouth was too full to tell me why. I think I asked him about a half-dozen times before he had swallowed enough to answer.

"No Momma, I need to tolor in the boxes. No white, Momma!"

He was insistent. The first thing that came to mind was the Monk episode when Monk is trying to take a fill-in the bubble standardized test. Oh no! OCD??? Half-pint again commenced to "tolor in the boxes-no white" but covered the same patch of orange several times before I convinced him he had colored enough of the white. He did get more white covered, but not all of it. I hope he learns to fill in a box more effectively by the time he is required to take one of those fill-in the bubble tests!