En el Mente de Joaquin

As usual at our house there is a lot of building going on. But a boy can't live on Duplos alone (gasp, it can't be true) and we've been enjoying some of our other building toys lately. Uncle Jeff and Aunt Alicia bought him these gears for his birthday and he's been having fun making them work. Unfortunately since he wants them to all move each other they have to be perfectly squished in. And the tolerances on plastic toys aren't all the good so they have to be in the just the right spot for everything to work. It's a recipe for frustration, but when it works, fabulous! The funny part about Joaquin is that he's always made fantastic contraptions with his building toys. Frequently they bear absolutely no resemblence to the description he gives you. But he definitely sees it, b/c if mommy knocks a few blocks off while trying to clean he is upset when he comes back in the room. (How does he even know? Some Joaquin creations are very crazy looking, how can he keep track?) So I was very

surprised when he called me to come see his legos 'playground' the other day. This is what I found, a cute little slide. Actually it's two slides, see the two scoops? The straight part is actually the ladder up. He was very proud of himself and I could see why, it was really quite slidelike. He was very excited to continue but was then frustrated by the swing (honestly Duplos are not meant to build a swing). So Mommy got creative with some outside toys and then we added a teeter-totter to complete it. Isn't our little playground lovely? But this is one representational artistic moment in the crazy surrealistic world of Joaquin. To give him credit he always has a vision of what he wants and he stays pretty faithful to it. You can even see it in his imaginative play. He's famous at Little Gym for the day he ran around the entire hour with one hand up like he was balancing a plate. They asked me afterward why he was holding his hand so oddly. I said, he's probably pretending something. When they asked he said he was holding a pie. It was chocolate pie if I remember correctly. After we all asked for a piece and it was eaten he dropped his hand. Another example was last Saturday while we were painting the FLC at church. Since all his playmates (Mommy, Daddy and Uncle Matty) were painting diligently he had to make his own entertainment. He played outside for awhile but got lonely and came inside to play in the room. He found a ball and some various bits of our equipment. Then he made up a game where he had to bounce the ball over the various pieces. And he had to do it in some order without knocking them down before he could move on. I'm not kidding, it was actually this complicated. And HE FOLLOWED THE RULES. Isn't that odd? If you make up the rules can't you just change them so you win? He was so frustrated with himself when he couldn't make it work. Sometimes I'm frustrated trying to get him to do things my way and sometimes I just can't wait to see what else is going on in that little head!