Bedtime currently is a complicated affair. The Lad's fascination with forts has regularly left Mum or Dad tearing themselves away from reading the epic dinosaur-trucks constructing a swimming pool tale to ask, "Are you paying attention?" Over the course of 3 or 4 weeks of this, we have yet to get a response that indicates comprehension or attentiveness. Worse still is the fact that his insistence on using every pillow in the house for his forts leaves Mum and I trying to figure out what combination of pillows we have been bequeathed with as he snores the night away on a pile of about a half dozen pillows of all sizes.
He has insisted on the pillow forts at his grandparents as well and can get in a pretty cranky mood after a fort collapse, despite the flimsy materials of down pillows and blankets that he resorts to for his construction. Is this a phase? Time will tell.
Lego and jigsaw puzzles fill more and more of his day, not to mention the living room and bedroom floors. There is one 45-piece puzzle that he has put together and immediately taken apart to reassemble that elements of the pieces - big chunky pieces for a toddler - are breaking apart and the finished work is best described as gap-toothed. He has moved on to puzzles with more pieces and they pose a little more challenge, if only because the individual pieces aren't cut in a manner that accommodates a better fit. These are the first thing he wants to do in the morning and it would be easy for him to distract himself (and us) from dinner to work on a puzzle that he started in the morning before breakfast.
After building some pretty complex Lego sets on his own, he has taken to coming up with his own Lego creations that do not follow any instructions and helping him in the task is something that is challenging for me. My recollections of my Lego peak involved me carefully drafting floor plans while putting together houses with good circulation and plenty of windows for each room in the house. When Gabriel asks me to help him build a house, however, things are more spontaneous. He occasionally gives me direction getting the walls up as high as possible. In return, he would resist my suggestions to install windows somewhere, anywhere in his edifice. We would settle into a rhythm of building the walls higher and higher, ensuring that we don't run into each other or get too ahead of one another.
I am cautious to ensure the bricks overlap for stability and strength, but I have let go of my desire to have the building be one colour. When it came time for building a roof on our most recent group effort, though, he let me construct layers of the overlapping flat pieces to close in toward the center in an efficient light cover on his building.
While he has demonstrated some aptitude for music at times, it has been (slightly) less frequent of late. The most recent was him singing the non-throat-shredding parts of the Foo Fighters "These Days" a month and a half ago. At the moment, the building and puzzles have been his main preoccupation with the exception of Star Wars but that is another story or seven. I recall a Mi' Kmaq gentleman telling Nadine during Month 6 of the pregnancy that Gabriel was going to be a lawyer, but it may be that the current phase is a sign of an engineering aptitude that his uncles would embrace. It is far too early to tell much of anything.
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