Nuts and Bolts

Demon Baby does not play with toys.

He has toys. He gets toys for Christmas and his birthday. He has cars like other little boys.

But he doesn't play with them.

What Demon Baby does is take things apart . . . and make new things with the pieces.

He takes all my knitting off my knitting needles because he needs Samurai swords.

He takes the wires from DVD players and computers and makes robots.

I find little nuts, bolts, and screws in the carpet upstairs. He needs them for his robots too. When I find these little screws, I look around and wonder . . . what is going to fall apart one day? Where does he GET these? What do these belong to?

He harvests old computers and keyboards to launch his rocket ships. We can't leave for church or the store until he races to his work station (which happens to be in my bedroom, where he has take over an entire dresser) to "save my work." Then he presses keys and apparently that will keep a meteor from landing on the house while we are gone. Yesterday he asked me to call Santa Claus and request "tools" for Christmas.

We had his yearly check-up last week. That's a blog for another day. The short version is I decribed some of his behaviors . . . like this lack of toys thing. And the doctor talked to him for a long while (during which Demon Baby used big words, and formulated each sentence with "Precisely, . . ." and "Actually, I'm quite serious . . . ") . She studied him and pretty much came to the same conclusion I did. He's not autistic. He doesn't have ADD or ADHD. He's just really, really, really, SCARY smart. And he sees the world a different way.

"That doesn't mean you are any less exhausted, but I cannot imagine what advice I could even offer you," she said to me. "You're pretty much doing everything I would tell you to do with him. You've got him figured out."

But she's wrong. I don't think anyone could really figure him out. Not really. I collect his little nuts and bolts. I don't tell anyone in my family, but I tuck them away someplace and once in a while, I just go and look at them. I marvel that the house hasn't fallen apart yet for all his disassembling. But the nuts and bolts are a reminder to me.

He sees the world as something to take apart and put back together his way. And that's okay. Different isn't such a bad thing. We're all nuts and bolts just trying to find out where we fit.