here our fearless adventurer sits, wondering why in the world he’d be sitting in his highchair, when everybody knows he doesn’t care for solid foods.

well, today is the day that we begin our very serious study of how to make things fall over and it’s much easier and more fun to do in the highchair, compared to sitting on the floor where things can’t fall nearly as far.

as you can see, odin is seriously ready to begin his studies. o.k. in reality, he’s just trying to figure out what i was playing around with right before i snapped the picture.

we discovered that jenga blocks are just as fun as lincoln logs ( and thankfully are a lot more difficult to choke on ) and are precisely the right size for pint sized hands.

we started with little towers, so he could get used to seeing them stacked up and how they move when they fall over.

like a little uber absorbent sponge, he soaks up the experience – even more completely than i could have possibly imagined. i’m in shock and awe as i watch him manipulate the blocks. i mean, he’s never even seen this before! sure he’s got big squishy play blocks, but these are little blocks; and after a stupendously short amount of time, he’s more or less deftly removing them from the tower i’ve created.

genius! well, perhaps i am a little biased.

after a few small scale efforts, it’s time for the Real Deal.

so, i made the largest tower i could make, fully expecting him to rather unelegantly smash it with his fists in a fit of excitement.

but see what he does?

with one hand he very carefully and precisely removes a single block while watching the top of the tower, as if he’s already figured out that removing this lone block is going to make the top of the tower do something very interesting.

and it does do something interesting!

regardless of its inherent interestingness, mr. serioso keeps his calm, cool and collected expression as he watches and learns.

ooooooh, it does even more interesting things when it falls all the way over!

some of the blocks even keep going, right over the side!

later, causing the tower to fall over becomes less fun than throwing the blocks down onto the floor.

then, or course, it’s time to start all over again, which means we need to build the tower. he’s smart enough to figure out that the basics of building it, but he still needs a helping hand from pops.

but not for long it seems.

maybe we should start playing chess sooner rather than later so i can at least challenge him a little 🙂