Spinning Wheels on toys?

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Yes, I like and liked spinning things, especially if they have lights on, but spinning myself makes me feel totally sick. I was more of a tree climber, I have to say...I was climbing trees until I was 15, and I still get the urge to climb things. I would climb anything.

Anyone remember the homemade button toys? Put a big button on a piece of string and twirl it then pull the string to make it spin?

My mom used to make me one when I was little and I'd sit there for hours watching the button spin until I finally wore out the string.

That's NOTHING! In the 60s, there was a wire gadget with a magnetized wheel. The wheel did NOTHING more than spin up and down the wire ramp for about 20 inches or so. Yet it sold well! And how about the little slinky? SAME STORY! They TRIED to complicate it by making it look like different objects, but the simple first one always seemed to be the most popular!

I guess the NT types just tend to stop being interested. As for ME? It is like I am two people. That little kid enthusiasm seems to come out at the wierdest times.

Steve

My son was a big wheel spinner. If he had a toy truck, he'd just turn it over and start spinning the wheels. This was when he was pre-verbal or barely verbal, so probably about one or so (he talked early and well). He also lined things up (match box cars, etc), and loved watching fans, washing machines, etc. This IS classic autistic stuff. I learned that when my girls were diagnosed. At the time of my girls dx, when I first immersed myself in learning about autism, I remember reading anecdotal descriptions of these 'red flags' and thinking that my son exhibited more of them then my daughters did!

Ironically, the girls never did any of these things, but have the disorder, while my son did all of the stuff, and doesn't have the disorder. He did stop these things when he was really young, though - sometime before the age of two, not sure when.

I wonder two things - is the spinning, lining things up, etc. just a normal phase that some kids go through when they're babies, before they really know what a truck, for example, is, and thus find the parts more interesting than the whole - that these things are just a "red flag" when they persist into toddler-hood and beyond? Or, is this indicative of some personality type - like, do kids who grow up to be engineers, etc. have these sorts of odd interests when they're very young? Perhaps, this is what 'hyper-focus' (which I have, and I'm an NT engineer) looks like in babies?

I still spin the wheels on toy cars and stuff and nobody seems to care at all. I remember I did this when I was younger as well, but I would also play with them correctly.

I used to do this when from when I was 4 to when I was twelve. I stopped playing with toys when I was twelve.

I pick up other objects and begin playing with them or rather in a stemming way because I don't really play with them. My brother says that I like women's jewelry, which I don't; it's just that I pick something up and begin feeling it.

I don't remember spinning things, but I do remember spinning myself in circles until I fell on more than one occasion. I seemed to like the feeling of dizziness, or I was somehow curious about it and wanted to bring it about to see what it was like. The last time I can recall doing it I may have been as old as fourteen.

Now, when I look at the wheels of passing cars, I often feel like my eyes are riveted to them - I have this compulsion to watch them spinning until the car is out of sight, and try and single out each spoke in the wheel as it turns round.

I also loved the swings as a child. Could spend hours there, my mind seemingly empty, just enjoying the swift motion and the rhythmic screech as the swing went back and forth. It was somehow - calming? - not sure I could really describe it. Even when I'd been there too long and was getting dizzy, it was still great and I didn't want to leave. When we were at the seaside, we'd rent a swing and stay there as long as the payment allowed us, and I'd be upset when we finally had to go. It also looks like I ran to each swing I saw on a playground we happened to pass, too, and it was also hard to make me leave it.

I recall playing with small objects - beads, little balls, cheap jewellery, colorful stones and glass. I put them into vases or lined them up on the table, did something with them. I treasured each and carried most of them with me everywhere - each of them meant something special to me (though I don't remember now what exactly), and I think I thoroughly enjoyed the way they looked.

I collected buttons of a specific kind - round buttons shapes like a semi-sphere, made of a pearly-colored plastic that could have different hues. I was obsessed about collecting all the hues there are, however subtle. My mother sometimes took me with her to work, and we passed the store where these buttons were sold on our way. Every time, my mother had to take me there and buy me a new button. If she didn't want to go there or wouldn't buy me a button, I'd start a scene. One time, when we were in the store itself and she refused for some reason to buy a button, I completely lost it and there were tears and screaming and whatnot, and it seems like the store clerk ended up trying to calm me down, too, because it got too bad. I put all those beads on a thick string so that they formed this sausage-like thing, and all the hues were placed in chromatic order, more or less the way they are on the color spectrum. I think I pretty much carried it with me wherever I went.

I had many beads of different types, and I could play for hours pouring them in and out of small glass containers, and just enjoying their vivid colors and the way some of them sparkled in the light of the lamp; it was like magic. I especially liked it when each container had beads of a separate sort, so that they didn't mix together. Maybe I was imagining that I was a pharmacist designing medicine, or a scientist conducting some sort of experiment. I liked trying to embroider something on a piece of cloth using the beads, too; but it was mostly the look of them that I loved, the way they poured like liquid or fine grain when there was a lot of them, the soft sounds they made against the glass.

Back then we lived in Sochi most of the time and went to the seaside every day, and I spent the time wandering the beach and collecting stones. Their colors and textures were so engaging, and it made me wonder how most of them were completely different and it was difficult to find any two that were alike. Sometimes I took a larger, flat stone, put the rock I'd found on it, and smashed it with another stone until it broke. Then I examined the way it looked inside, which was often very different from the surface, the stone being shiny and fresh and richly colored. I had a textbook, "Basics of minerology", for first year geology students I think, and I felt sorry that I didn't have a special hammer to break open the stones, and no equipment to start a real mineral collection. But I figured I should do with whatever I means I had at the time.

I had an especial liking for pieces of glass polished by the sea until they were completely smooth. I looked for them everywhere and was very glad when I found one. They were like little miracles. I collected them and had a fairly large basket filled with them to the brim, which I also tried to take with me wherever I happened to go. I think I even tried to take it on the plane once when we were going back to Lithuania, and was very upset when I was told I couldn't.

I liked running the wheels of my toy cars over my face. I'd still do it if I still had the cars

I remember those toy cars which you could pull back, and they would move forward when they were released. I used to turn the back wheels with my thumbs, then release the wheels, making a satisfying revving sound.

I used to spin things quite frequently too as a kid. It became interesting looking at things that were mechanically linked together. For example, watching a set of gears spin at different speeds when one was turned.. One of my favorties was the little gearbox out of those flywheel toys. Remember the ones that you'd push along the floor, then when you released them, they would keep going? They had a nifty little gearbox in them that spun a flywheel. It was fun to spin the wheel, and watch all the gears and stuff move.

Another thing that captivated me, and probably started my obsession with audiovisual equipment was watching my Father's open-reel tape deck. It didn't matter what music I was listening to, I just liked watching the tape reels spin, and the meters bounce up and down. The turntable was pretty cool too. It became real fun when Dad was recording a record to the tape deck. Both the turntable and the tape deck would be doing their thing!