Alex has puzzles of a garbage truck, a tow truck, and a dump truck.
Each has 49 pieces, each piece a little bigger than a quarter. In the
dump truck scene, there's also a guy laying bricks, a red-headed
driver, and, in the background, three birds and a crane. The garbage
truck scene includes a sanitation worker in an orange jumper, a stone
wall, and a guy strapping a bike to the roof of a red compact. The tow
truck scene has a smashed-up blue car, a cop, a photographer, a guy in
red coveralls working the winch, and a dog on a leash staring right at
Alex as he softly snaps the pieces together.
I timed Alex the other day. Garbage truck: 11 minutes. Tow truck: 9
minutes. Dump truck: 15 minutes. The three birds and the crane must
slow him down.
These are not Alex's first puzzles. He also has a 36-piece school bus,
big pieces but a ton of blue. I dumped it out the other night, to keep
him occupied while Jill and I entertained our friend Jessica. Jessica
and I watched Alex trying the pieces this way and that, never lifting
his head. "He's fast," Jessica said. The bus took 10 minutes, and he
then began trolling for something else to do. Sooner or later, such
searching leads him to screeching or to Jill's dresser, where he roots
out her stuff. I dumped out Ned's two Thomas the Tank Engine puzzles.
"Is Alex doing two puzzles at once?" Jessica asked. He was. Before he
brushed his teeth and asked for his binkie, Alex also completed his
24-piece Elmo and 24-piece Clifford. At the same time.
Alex has been doing puzzles almost since he could sit up. He started
with big plastic shape-sorters: squares, circles, and rectangles of
red, blue, green, purple. Before he'd even eaten by mouth, I think, he
was plunking the shapes through the right holes. "That'll translate
into good skills with letters when he's older," a therapist noted. Then
came the wooden puzzles: a "Sesame Street" farm, barnyard animals,
boats and copters, a school bus, a fire engine. Each piece in these
puzzles tucked into a cutout in the wooden base. These puzzles are now
entombed in the boys' dresser. I joked to Jill the other night that
Alex could do one of these now just by looking at it.
"I don't know about that," she replied, "but I do think he could do one of them with his eyes closed."
Even though he's in kindergarten, Alex still doesn't have many words,
so he couldn't tell us about his talent. "Does he ever do puzzles
here?" Jill once asked his pre-school teacher.
Oh yes, all the time, the teacher replied.
"But ever jigsaw puzzles?" Jill wanted to know.
Yes, of course jigsaw puzzles, the teacher said. Twelve-piecers!
Ned started doing puzzles for the same reason he bit a plastic ruler in
half last night: Alex does it. Sometimes the brothers do puzzles next
to each other at their little table. The quiet of concentration
blankets the house. The quiet of a library, of a chess game, of
craftsmen. But right now, Ned is more like the guy in that office who
talks when everyone is busy. Once over puzzles Ned softly chattered
support to Alex, who at last got so fed up and distracted that he left
the garbage truck unfinished.
"Daddy, I need help!" Ned will say. "I can't do it!"
"You are doing it, Ned," I say. Alex doesn't even look up, his
attention anchored on the 49 pieces. "Stay on it, Alex!" I call, as I
fly into the kitchen to do the dishes or bag the trash or some such
chore that seems more important than watching my son do puzzles, but in
fact isn't.
Less and less, Alex needs help on a puzzle. He prefers to link the
first two pieces, then work and sort by color, and test-fit pieces
almost one-by-one. He used to need me to find the corners. He used to
need me to find the edges. Now he just needs me to dump the pieces out
of the Zip-Lock bag and put them right-side-up. Sometimes. I wonder if
he could do this too, but thinks it's nice to let me help. Wise guy.
Where's that 60-piece Noah's Ark?
Bio: Jeff Stimpson's articles and essays can be found on his website at jeffslife.net Jeff has also written a book entitled: Alex: The Fathering Of A Preemie.
|
