The whole set of character from the movie Cars.
A giant bin of hot wheels.
4 containers full of gems and rocks.
Books of sticker collections that had to be completed.
Country flags.
Airplane models.
Does this sound familiar?
Moving from one little collection to another seems to be Cole’s thing. (if you haven’t already, you can get an introduction to my family here)
Cole started out when he was quite young, loving the Cars movies. We watched them one by one over and over again, he developed an obsession with them. So of course for birthdays, Christmas and more he started getting the characters.
Then more.
And more….
If he was missing one we had to find it for him. He constantly played with them, our cat was even named after Sally the girl car in the movie! Then as he grew and got a bit older it faded away. He would still play with them but only here and there.
The new collection became gems and rocks. We started going to PEI in the summer and one of the activities we did was mining for gems. He loved discovering the new and exciting gems he found in the sand.
He got books about gems and started learning as much as he could about them. Different types, the colours, he even found out about birthstones and learned what each one was. Each summer when we’d go back to PEI, he’d ask to do the mining for gems so he could add to his collection and see which ones he would get next.
The thing with Cole is, when he gets an interest in something he doesn’t just start collecting them, he also has to learn everything he can about it. It’s like he immerses himself in that subject and that is all he talks about or plays with for a while.
Each thing was teaching him more and more and each collection became bigger and bigger.
He still does the gem mining each summer and still wants to get more but his new interest became country flags. I can’t even say I remember where it came from, I think he just developed an interest in geography and then once he was learning about the places he learned what each flag looked like.
He absorbed it all.
He knew every country and continent, much more than I do. He even started drawing his own little flags, colouring them and cutting them out. Soon we had at least 100 of them. I decided to laminate them so they wouldn’t get ripped. To this day he still plays games with them, makes up battles with the countries. He would point to flags everywhere we went that had different ones and name them all. It still amazes me how he knows and remembers it all. His school backpack was flag design as well.
He moved on to planes and has quite a few models, although there are many more he wants. He has learned so much about them, even goes on flight radar now when he sees one in the sky, wanting to know what it is, where it’s going and where it came from. He got to go into the cockpit on our last trip which was exciting for him.
His biggest and latest thing is cutouts. It is little tiny drawings he has done of characters he has created. They are everywhere in the house. In baggies, on his desk, downstairs, in bins. He has an entire little world he made and constantly does games with them. His creativity is endless and his mind amazes me.
As the years went by I found out that this is something that many kids on the spectrum have in common: the collecting and the immersion in that topic. They have that one thing they love and you want to feed into that interest and help it grow.
You may end up with a million tiny pieces of paper all over your house but to see them in their happy place with their made up world or doing their own thing with a treasured collection, it just makes you smile.
