Lining up toys

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I remember as a young child (2-6 years old) I was obsessed with toy cars. I had about 30 of them and would line them up from one side of the room to the other.

My parents thought, and still think, that it's a sign of high intelligence, but I thought it was a potential sign of autism?

I also had a 15 year olds ability to spell and read at the age of 5, and learned to talk at 6 months, but walked at a comparatively later time, when I was 2 years old.

I talked to some people about lining up toys, and no one has said that they did it (all NTs, to my knowledge.)

Is lining up toys a sign of high intelligence, or autism?

Did any of you guys line up toys?

I lined up toys when I was a child. I could spend hours doing that. Good times, good times. I have not heard that it is somehow related to intelligence, however I have heard it can be a thing auties do. That said, I have a daughter who was also into arranging her toys when she was young. She is not anywhere on the spectrum, but she certainly did love lining up her teen titans and those farm horse dolls she had. It was adorable.

I still do that to my X Files and knight action figures. Sometimes there's a pattern to it: shortest to tallest, color location on the spectrum, etc. I also enjoy systematically knocking them down with dice hurled from a small metal replica of a catapult.

My autistic son used to make tall towers out of stacking blocks - duplos, etc. Is that like lining them up? At the time I had no idea he was autistic so I just took it as a sign of high intelligence, which he clearly had.

My memory is hazy on it, but I've been told that I tended to coordinate the colors of my Lego blocks when I was a youngster, placing them in regular patterns. Apparently Queen Elizabeth (not sure if the first or the second, probably the latter) did the same with her toys.

When I was 2-4 years old, I used to line up all my toys, sorted by colour or size. Now I am 26 and I still line things up, but I use more developed strategies like alphabetical by author (my textbooks) or hexadecimal colour code (my sciencey tshirt collection).

I am very intelligent but I think lining up is a general autism symptom.

I didnt really line up my toys, but i would go into the the spice drawer and stack all the spices. It was a daily ritual where i would just stack them in the same exact way every day.

I never lined up toys. As a toddler I remember having brightly-coloured blocks, but I didn't stack them in an unimaginate logical way. I just played with them, mostly enjoying building a house or tower with a loved one. I was very 'NT' as a small child. I don'r know what happened to have me turn out non-NT.

Yeah (up to about 4 or so).

Well, there's pictures of my toys lined up and my mother said I did such. So, I guess I did.

Interestingly, I did it in a logical fashion, such as based on size and shape.

I did this a lot and still do sort of, I've always like putting my stuff in order to be neat and displayed. I was pretty imaginative and played with toys a lot as a kid, I was never really bored as a kid to be honest as I could occupy myself with almost anything.

I remember my mother making comments about how I'd spent all my allotted playtime "setting up" but hadn't "actually played". I wasn't lining toys up though - I had this gorgeous, gender-normative Barbie mansion my [almost certainly undiagnosed autistic] grandfather had built from scratch. Every play session, I'd painstakingly fill the house with furniture [Gramps made that too] and scale groceries [a combination of purchased and things I'd made]. I'd make the beds, and fill the closets [which came with built in hangers, because of course] with clothing arranged by type and color. I'd set the table... lay out props for a storyline I was creating in my head... but unless someone came and prompted me to act out the storyline, I'd just keep planning it.

It is a sign of autism, especially if it is done the exact same way everytime.

I line up change.

I did - and everything was stacked or lined up according to size, shape or color. Shoes in the hall were arranged by means of measuring tape, before I went to bed.

I would think autism. Its pretty common for autistics to like sorting or putting things in patterns. I still do it to this day. Its relaxing for some reason. I could spend hours sorting my kids legos. I didn't usually want to build anything... just sort.

I remember I liked stacking blocks alone for hours.