He may be too young for footwork, but he’s not too young for point control:

In November, there was a national fencing competition held here in Austin. Our friends and Minnesota coaches Ro and Kate came down to coach a handful of Twin Cities Fencing Club fencers and we got the chance to hang out with them. (We even hired a babysitter and had a proper adult dinner out!) We brought Sean to the fencing competition so he could see his first fencing action since he was a tiny infant. His favorite thing to do (besides ride the escalators in the hallways)? Run up and down the empty strips. I made him a Twin Cities Fencing Club t-shirt, and Ben bought him a (saber?!) whacky-whacker, which Sean enjoyed using to whack his Mommy and Daddy. A fun weekend all around.

For those who haven’t seen this already on Facebook:
1) Who am I?
2) What does this box do?

Sean has become fascinated with letters in the past couple months. It started with the ABC song, which he can sing through on his own now. And he’s been learning the capital letters (starting with ‘S’ is for Sean, ‘M’ is for Mommy, and ‘D’ is for Daddy). It’s interesting to note that he doesn’t much care about rotation and orientation. I mean, it’s interesting to me; probably many people are familiar with kids writing their ‘P’s backward. But Sean (and probably most kids) can identify letters regardless of orientation, which is pretty amazing if you’ve ever tried to teach a computer to do the same thing. In fact, we had a few weeks where Sean insisted ‘W’ was really ‘M’ — because, you know, just flip it over, see?!? It’s an ‘M’! Likewise he’s still insisting that 2’s and 5’s are really ‘S’s. The whole learning thing is fascinating. Anyway, I was amazed to note that Sean actually can name almost all the capital letters; he got letter magnets for Christmas and was pulling them out of the box one-by-one and naming them, while putting them on the refrigerator. There were a few where he asked, “this is?” but he knew the rest. Holy cow.

Here’s Sean singing (parts of) the ABC song back in November. He could do the whole thing, but I was never able to get it all on video…

Warning: dangerous amounts of cute follow in these pictures from November at our local elementary school…

(I should note that Sean photos were relatively rare this fall because Sean always wanted to be on the other side of the camera, taking the picture. This particular day he was interested enough in his surroundings that I could take out the camera and get a few shots…)

Well, we got our wish. After Sean had six teeth come in all at once last year, we got a long reprieve before the next tooth appearance. In December, Tooth #17 started making its entrance — much to the dismay of Sean’s toys and books, which had thought they were done with being gnawed upon. It’s the first of his second-year molars to come in, and he’s been drooling like a rabid animal the past several weeks. Let’s hope this round goes fairly quickly and then we’ll be done with baby teeth!

Teeth in blue Sean got before he was one-year old. Teeth in green he got last winter. The orange one is working its way in now:

About a month ago, we went to the playground and Sean did this:

He then slid down a slide, ran around, and did it again. Several times…

The thing about having a toddler is… art appears randomly on your kitchen floor.

Just some family photos…