Lining Up Toys

One of the things I kept dismissing the past few months in thinking about any of the early indicators of autism with Rosie was this thing about kids playing with their toys by lining them up instead of using them as the manufacturers intended. I don't remember her doing that (though I remember it in my brother!) and so I figured it was one of those things she didn't ever manifest. After all, she plays imaginatively with toys, incorporating them into little stories. (Though it was always really hard, if sometimes downright impossible, to get her out of her imaginary world before age 6 or so.)

We were looking at the family picture album, though, and I saw that she did line toys up to some extent, more than I thought, though I don't know what would be considered a "typical" amount of lining up. We gave her stickers a few times when she was little, until we learned what she would invariably do with them. She would always line stickers up on her legs, the carpet, or the furniture or walls, and that was that. Trying to get her to create scenes with them or put them into a book or otherwise preserve them was pointless. We couldn't get her to understand where appropriate places for stickers would be. She didn't care about whether they were pretty or interesting at all. I remember that being a bit puzzling, since her older sister always wanted to save the pretty stickers when she was that age. Somehow, I identified that disinterest in keeping stickers with how Rosie always let helium balloons go instead of trying to keep them.

Likewise, I also noticed/remembered in the family pictures that Legos were generally geometric arrangements for Rosie, not representations of buildings or animals or whatever, until age 6 or so. But that makes at lot of sense, doesn't it? Legos lend themselves to geometric arrangement, especially symmetric arrangement. Do "neurotypical" kids always, always create "things" out of Legos instead of arranging them aesthetically? Rosie creates "things" out of Legos nowdays, though I do notice some "perseveration" - really extensive airports with a dozen or more airplanes and long runways, fleets of ships and boats that make their way into drawings and chants and poetry.

When I notice myself starting to use "quote marks" a lot, I think it's a hint that I'm starting to wonder... what's so darn unusual about this way of thinking, anyway? Er, it's just all that engineering and accounting blood in our family.