OCD?

At what age do people start to exhibit OCD tendencies?

This week we have been doing a fun little experiment with Jairus.

It all started one evening when Joe noticed that all the fridge letters were organized in straight color coded lines. He asked if I had arranged them that way. Nope -- I have no time to organize fridge letters!! I need to organize closets and such but not the front of the fridge! Well, Joe hadn't done it...so that left Jairus. As we were pondering this possibility, Jairus came to check out what we were checking out. Joe rearranged a couple of the letters. Jairus responded with a quick "no, no, no" and put them back in their places in the color coded lines! Wow, we were impressed. Not only does he know all his letters and their sounds, but he can color code them. Hmm. That's pretty cool.

But next morning I was second guessing this talent Jairus exhibited. A family friend had been over that weekend, maybe he arranged the letters for some strange reason. Hey, it's possible. I would have called to ask but it was 5:45 am. So, that day Joe set up our spy cam - aka, the DVD recorder. As Joe fixed Jairus breakfast, the camera recorded his morning play at the fridge. At first it just looked like normal sing along with the leapfrog letters. But at the end of 6 or 7 minutes you can begin to see the pattern. He was purposefully placing them in lines again arranged by color! Sure enough, we had proof that it was Jairus!

Now I don't think he can be terribly OCD, because when Joe messed up the letters, Jairus was ok with that and actually left them messed up the rest of the day. But, this morning Jairus rearranged them again into his color coded lines. He played with them during the day, messing them up again, but tonight he was organizing them in lines.

And to think that the last couple of weeks I was worried about finding the time to set up his toy storage to help him learn to categorize and organize. (I read it in some magazine.) Jairus seems to be doing just fine without my OCD help!