Gender roles are alive and well in this house.
Anyone that says that boys are girls are similar or enjoy the same things has never met my kids. (as I type this I'm sitting outside in the back yard Frank just told me he is going to pee on the grass. Um, no. Go inside and pee in the toilet please.)
Boys are boys and girls are girls. They learn differently. They play differently. They laugh differently. They love differently. I think it's amazing.
Just a bit ago the "hunter/gatherer" roles were being nicely displayed in the yard.
Frank had found a random stick and was fighting off the bad guys. Sometimes the bad guys were in the tree. Sometimes they were in the fence. But mostly they could not be seen. He was just wildly and fiercely wielding his sword like a force to be reckoned. He really has some mad sword fighting skills. There were some great sound effects. Some high kicks, some great jumps. His imagination was on overdrive.
In the other corner was Aili. Carrying around a disassembled dump truck. Just the bucket part. She was carefully putting little found objects in it. Putting the most perfect blades of grass in it. The exact stick. Sometimes a better stick was found and the old one was discarded. She was very excited when she found a beer bottle top from one of Daddy's campfires last weekend. There is also a few rocks and a bubble blower stick. She carried this blue truck piece around like it was a baby. So carefully and with such tenderness. And when she was looking for the perfect addition, she would chit chat with her self. "Ohhh, this green leaf is *perfect* for my collection. Awwww...this rock is the exact thing I was looking for" I could listen to that all day.
Even though both of these gems came from the same two people, they are oh so different. Frank fully embraces all that is boy. Aili devours all that is girl. They both had the same yard with the same sticks and same rocks around. But what they chose to do with them were oh so different. They have amazed me once again.
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So cute! I only have girls, but I notice the difference between them and their boy cousins - it's like night and day.
ReplyDeleteLast week we went to an inflatable bouncy gym place. My 3 year old was in one of the bouncy areas when a little boy about her age entered and started barrelling around, flinging himself into walls - falling all over himself in his mad dash for fun. His mom was outside next to me, and she said "Be careful buddy, there's a girl in there." I thought, so true. I've never *seen* such play before, and neither had my daughter. She just stayed out of his path and watched with awe. So funny.
You know how it is at my house - all hunters, no gatherers! This post is great, Carrie, and really captures the differences between our little men and ladies. It's so obvious, yet I feel compelled to apply for a university grant to do a study to prove it!
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