How my son is like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park

One of the first things you learn about velociraptors in Jurassic Park—right after they eat the cow!—is that they’re always testing the electric fences for weaknesses—just waiting for that moment when everyone’s guard is down so they can strike.

As you may have gathered from recent conversations, visits, or posts on this site, Joseph loves to sneak into the bathroom and splash toilet water. We try to keep the bathroom doors shut all of the time, but, from time to time—despite our best efforts—they’re left open. On more than one occasion, when things got too quiet around the family room, and there wasn't a peep coming out of his bedroom, we’ve found Joseph in a bathroom trying to empty toilet water out on to the floor (the upside to this is that we have incentive to clean the toilets more frequently).

So here’s where the raptor comparison comes in. Whenever Joseph passes a bathroom door, as well as at various times throughout the day when it pleases Joseph’s fancy to get up and walk over to the bathroom door, Joseph will push on the bathroom door to see if it’s really shut, hoping to exploit the lapse in our security system so he can attack. Most of the time, the door is shut, but he knows if he just keeps trying, he’ll get through sooner or later.

Of course, the other thing that I always remember about the Jurassic Park raptors is that they learned to open doors. We’re not quite sure what we’re going to do once he reaches that milestone, but I plan on teaching him how to use the scrubbing brush.

Another one of Joseph's current, and slightly more sanitary, fascinations is shoes. Last week, as we were busy packing for a trip to Nana and Grandpa's house, I noticed that Joseph was scurrying away from our closet with a shoelace draped over his shoulder. The attached athletic shoe kicked him in the diaper with each step as he navigated his way around half-filled suitcases and partially-closed doorways.

Fearing that he was rushing to toss the shoe in the toilet or a trash can, I followed after him, and came across the following sight:


In the above picture, you'll see Joseph's dirty clothes hamper, and what we thought was a perfectly reasonable place to store his dirty clothes. Apparently, while his parents were busy packing, Joseph decided to empty the hamper, move it into his parents' bedroom, and fill it with shoes, and nothing but shoes.


Discovered, but undeterred, Joseph repeated the process by digging out another pair of shoes, depositing them in the basket, and then rushing off to find another pair.


The thing that amused us was that he found shoes from all over the house and brought them back to the hamper in the other room. Some of the shoes were his, some were his parents', and there were shoes of all sorts of styles, but he only gathered shoes.

Joseph, much like his father, is easily distracted, and until now, we assumed that he (Joseph, not his father) just played with whatever was in front of him and basically only thought about whatever objects he could see at that moment. Apparently, he's reached some sort of cognitive milestone where he can think of objects in a different space and then organize similar objects into a common group.

If Joseph's easily-distracted father had not slept through most of his early-childhood-development class during undergrad, he probably could identify this milestone by its proper name.

(Joseph's easily-distracted father would now like to take this opportunity to say that his early-childhood-development class was much too early in the morning, and it was one of the most disappointing classes of his undergraduate experience, so he is more than justified in not knowing how to properly refer to this developmental benchmark. Joseph's easily-distracted father would now also like to end this post because he's beginning to think about the only class that was more disappointing during undergrad, Asian Humanities, and nothing makes him question why he ever went to college more than thinking about his Asian Humanities class. Joseph's easily-distracted father also has a deep-rooted concern about excessively-long parentheticals and their effect on a reader's attention and their relation to the flow and focus of a writing).