You hear about people who had obsessions when they were kids, like dinosaurs or trains and how this fueled their desire to go on and be a paleontologist or something like that.. or of people who had a trajectory schema (a repeated interest/compulsion) that lead on to a love of ball sports or some such… I am currently reading a book about a naturalist, G.V. Hudson, in NZ who started his bug collection and drawings at 10. The book is written by his grandson who is also an entomologist. Chris Hadfield saw men walking in space at age 9 and started his plan to be an astronaut at 10.

I think my child has a thing for labeling, or is it filling or just grouping things. When she was little it was expressed in pictures where she would divide up the space then put things in the divisions. Helena’s non figurative art still has patterns. I don’t know what this means, I think it helps her with division, symmetry and other mathematical ideas. I only made this conclusion after she did something  obvious, even for me, she had counted the dots in one of her works and the dots in the compartments showed the numerical sequence 1, 2, 3, 4 etc – she was nearly 4 at the time.

These are some of last years doodles..

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I think these ones look like a space map – she agreed. Whoops should have got her to talk first..

Even some of her representational art such as this robot gets divided into sections..

When she was about 3 we went to drop some children at their Dad’s work and the security person gave her baby doll a label with the dolls name on it… Since then she has been labeling her toys in a variety of ways. She groups them. I thought she might be interested in classification of animals but no.

This is a recent one – the symbols tell what groups/activities they do… in this case cooking, gardening and drawing.

This is one she got one of her friends to play along with, it was a pet shop. It says the name, Duke, that it is 4 years old and it’s a male dog.

There have been so many examples over the years.. Along the same lines are the feathers which have returned recently too, the last lot graduated from the “Academy” so there is a new container and roll call list.

Watch this space… a future great er um.. filing? person. There are 437 jobs filing on seek today!!

I wonder how many kids had weird obsessions that went no where, or maybe their obsession did lead to one of those hobbies/lives that just aren’t esteemed in the way such grand things as Astronaut, Palentologist, Engineer or any kind of Scientist, or even per6haps a famous (we don’t hear interviews of the ‘I always wanted to write’ non famous ones) authors are…. I bet she will alphabetise her spices.