All of a sudden, Mateo’s relationship with blocks changed.
Just two days ago his only response to blocks was to wait for some adult to stack them high, and then rush at the stack to knock it over.
Well, no longer. Yesterday before bed, Mateo saw an errant block lying on the floor. He picked it up, went over to the box of blocks to put it back… but instead, noticing the other blocks, something clicked in his mind. He took out another block, put it on the floor, and put the first block on top of it.
And then he repeated it over and over again, with more and more blocks. He would stack them two high, three high, four high, five high. He would stack rectangular prisms on top of cylinders; cylinders on top of cylinders; cubes on top of those stacks. He wouldn’t mind when things fell but instead just tried again and again and again.
For a tired boy, spending 10 minutes doing things with blocks was pretty amazing. We ended up delaying bed time a bit until he got tired of the blocks. Still, we were pretty impressed by the sudden realization of how block stacking worked, and his dedication to this task.
growing baby 
And yesterday he stacked 6 blocks! It was quite the little tower! Plus, the other night (when he started stacking blocks), he took all of the triangle blocks out of the box and gave them to Ilya. I hadn’t realized that he thought of the triangles as distinct kinds of blocks, but my mom says that he’s been favoring the triangles for a while.
Mateo also loves walking backwards now–he runs forward and then walks backwards in reverse, runs forward and walks backward. Mateo has also started feeding me pretend food: he’ll give me a little bit of nothing to chew on and then give me more. He’s tooooo darling!
By: lgreenberg on February 5, 2010
at 12:35 pm