Basketball season is here

For a while now, Sean has made it known that he enjoys playing with balls. Soccer balls, tennis balls, basketballs. He doesn't have a baseball to play with yet, though he has noticed the Red Sox baseball which one of our friends gave him, and we've had to explain that baseballs are not for playing with indoors, because they can be more powerful and dangerous than other balls. A baseball is small enough that he can get some distance on it, and it's hard enough that it can break a high percentage of things it might hit. Kicking and throwing other balls, in the apartment, though, has been fine and safe (so far).

In fact, lately we've been going to the nearby park and lifting him up to shoot his outdoor soccer ball towards the hoop (or at least the net), and now he puts together the concepts of "ball" "outside" "basketball" "park" "hoop" "rim" and "backboard." Sometimes we wind up kicking his miniature soccer ball around the basketball court, since it's a wide, flat, level surface, and the ball rolls smoothly on it (we play basketball with his mini soccer ball because it's a good size for his hand, and it's light enough he can shoot/throw it up at the hoop; his mini basketball is a bit heavier and larger).

Sean also enjoys playing catch; if we're indoors, this includes positioning one (or sometimes both) of his parents on the sofa: "Sit!" he sometimes insists, and we throw a ball back and forth with him. The bigger balls are easier for him to catch; sometimes he prefers throwing one of his smaller, softer balls up by some of our papers/boxes near a window, which can amuse him for anywhere from two to thirty throws. It's been a relief that he has a pretty good sense both of how he can control a ball when he throws it, and that he's generally chosen to throw balls in the house where there's room to do so safely, and at targets (like us) rather than, for example, light fixtures. (Unlike, for example, one of his parents, who once spent an afternoon lofting balled-up socks into a glass lampshade in a childhood bedroom until a strange burning smell became evident.)

But we decided it was time to stop having the regulation-size basketball around for indoor play the day Sean shot it into the sink.