More recently he's started organising. I watch him playing with his toys and grouping them in various ways. Sometimes he puts all the vehicles together, sometimes he loads all the human characters into the back of a truck, sometimes he puts his soft toys in one pile and his plastic toys in another pile.
Another thing he does is "return" objects to their "correct" location, and I do need the inverted commas. Sometimes I decide to move items around the house and when Jude discovers them in their new location he moves them back to their old home, like the cushion I took from the living room and put on our bed that found its way back to the living room, or the umbrella I took from the hat stand and put in my handbag that was later found back at the hat stand.
He is often more interested in stacking his stackable crayons than drawing with them and wants to line up his non-stackable crayons neatly side-by-side.
There's a small voice in the back of my mind that keeps wondering if this is slightly Autistic behaviour, but Jude is so affectionate and engaged in everything that I have to shake such thoughts from my mind.
I just found this on Wikipedia that is quite interesting:
In the psychology of Freud, the anal stage is said to follow the oral stage of infant/early-childhood development. This is a time when an infant's attention moves from oral stimulation to anal stimulation (usually the bowels but occasionally the bladder), usually synchronous with learning to control their excretory functions, a time of toilet training. Freud theorized that children who experience conflicts during this period of time may develop "anal" personality traits, namely those associated with a child's efforts at excretory control: orderliness, stubbornness, a compulsion for control, as well as a generalized interest in collecting, possessing, and retaining objects.
Freud has been largely (wholly?) debunked by the psycho-analytical community, but Jude did suffer recently with his burns so I have to wonder if this behaviour is in some way related to his desire to control his world.
Is his behaviour completely normal or should I be concerned?
