There is something existentially romantic about the image of an infant playing with wooden blocks—not to mention practical. A child happily gnawing on a piece of wood is doubtless gleaning much useful information about its environment. If that piece of wood also happens to be decorated with letters and numbers, that child will have the further advantages of early exposure to the three pillars of Modern Education, namely reading, writing, and arithmetic. Perhaps through osmosis. So when I ran across a set of colorful wooden blocks at a children’s clothing consignment shop not long ago, I grabbed them up hurriedly and unexamined, lest they be discovered and purchased by any other mothers similarly drawn toward the one wooden treasure in a sea of garish plastic. Wooden blocks are wooden blocks, after all, right?
Wrong. As part of my ongoing effort to initiate Edward into the world of the literate before the age of, say, two-and-a-half, I brought out the blocks yesterday, convinced that we could have him writing within the hour. To my dismay, however, the blocks proved woefully inadequate to the task, offering us only enough material with which to spell:
Um… hello? Further exploration into the matter indicated other critical shortages: 
…although, after some creative brainstorming, Joseph and I were able to come up with something:
The blocks proved wanting in other crucial ways as well, as the pictures on the unlettered sides of the blocks rather enigmatically defied comprehension:
Essentially, we had a defective set of blocks—a set with which we could do little more than: 
Oh. Better make that:
My dreams of teaching Edward his alphabet thus cruelly shattered, I vowed never again to purchase toys from a second-hand store so trustingly and set out this morning for an upgraded model. Not all blocks are created equal, after all.
Edward and I were successful in our search, coming home with a set of 95 blocks that had Edward salivating before they even came out of the box. We did not have time to teach him how to spell his name before the excitement overtired him, but I have hopes that, effectively equipped as we now are, we should be able to make satisfactory progress before the end of the week.
