Wave of the future, wave of the future, wave of the future...

I remember when I was younger sitting down at the computer to write and popping in a CD before I started. I'd hear the notes of the first song and then seemingly only minutes would go by and I'd hear the CD end. I was concentrating so intensely I didn't even hear the music.

Heath told me a similar story about himself. In elementary school his class went down to the library. He picked out his book and then sat down to read while waiting for everyone else. Some time later he looked up and the library was deserted. He walked back to class, where the teacher informed him they'd called his name and even touched him to get his attention, but he never noticed.

Given that, it's no surprise to me that Ben has inherited the same type of focus. Sure, sometimes he has the attention span of a gnat, but other times he concentrates so strongly it's amazing. He has a small, plastic train that came with several Little People figures, a tiger, giraffe and zookeeper. I've seen him play with that train and those figures for up to an hour and all he does is put the tiger in one car, put the giraffe in another and put the zookeeper in the smoke stack. Then he looks at them for a second and he moves them around to different spots. For an hour. An hour in toddler time is like a day in adult time (and often it feels like a day to me).

He's also incredibly meticulous. Lately a lot of his playing has involved lining up toys or arranging them in a specific way. One day I found that he'd taken Heath's and my sneakers and put them all in a very straight line. They were so neat I couldn't believe he'd done it, aside from the fact that they were lined up on a dining room chair. That's not normally where we leave our sneakers.

Fears about having an OCD child aside, it's exciting to finally start seeing some of my traits shine through Ben. Heath and I feel like we're on the edge of OCD ourselves, anyway. I wonder if you can buy family packs of Prozac at Sam's?