Connor's Newest Obsession

I'll give you three guesses as to what Connor's newest obsession is, although after you see these photos, you're probably only going to need one.

Football!

High school football. College football. NFL. Imaginary football in the house played with stuffed animals. (Poor Chip and Dale. They are his favorite "balls" to toss around. Probably because they are brown.)


After realizing that Connor's new love for all things football was going to stick around for a while, I decided to do something about it. Or with it, rather.

First, we made a map of the United States, and we put a team banner on it showing the location of all 32 of the NFL teams. Now Connor knows where all the teams are from. He's learning geography! Oh, and he wants to go and visit all 32 stadiums.

Then, we made him a book. We printed out all the weekly schedules for the 2011 NFL games. The past weeks show what the scores were, so Connor can see who won each game. The future weeks have spots for us to write the scores in. In fact, we just wrote in all the scores from week 8. Connor practiced his printing and wrote in about half of the numbers all by himself.

We also put in a section about all the past Super Bowl winners, so that Connor could see who played in each Super Bowl, and what the scores were for all of those games.

He spends a ton of time studying this book. Almost as much time as he spends looking up NFL team info and game highlights on the internet. (Yes, he knows how to use Google now. He's realized that he can copy any word that he finds interesting into the search engine and a whole interactive page will appear for him to explore.)


If you've talked to Connor in the past few weeks, you've heard him go on and on and on (and on) about who won what game and what the score was. He has an amazing memory for the stats, and even though you may think he's just making it up, because how on earth could anyone be bothered to remember them all, he actually knows them.

And I love hearing him talk about the teams. He still calls some of the teams by the wrong names...although he's got most of them all figured out by now.

Even though he knows that the real name of the team is "Baltimore Ravens," he is still in the habit of calling them the "B Birds."

And he always mispronounces the Patriots as the "Pastry-oughts." I think this is an improvement over the real team name, actually.

The Broncos? Those are the "Fire Horses."
The Saints? The "Upside-down Anchor Team."

And because he knows that I like the Dallas Cowboys, that's "Mommy's Team." And for reasons that I cannot explain, the Kansas City Chiefs are "Mommy's Arrow Team."

His favorite teams are the Steelers and the Raiders. Because they wear black uniforms.