Tea Parties and Guns

There are some things that just seem to be nature and have nothing to do with nurture.   Having a boy and a girl brings this point home again and again, regardless of what we do or don’t do.    My daughter likes to engage socially, play games, have conversations, make connections.    My son likes sticks, projectiles, weapons and fighting.    We don’t encourage either of them in one direction nor have we tried to unnecessarily squash their natural tendencies.

As someone who never was into fighting or weapons, I don’t get it personally, but I remember the friends from my neighborhood who were boys from my childhood.   I never understood why Rob was so excited about getting the whale harpoon to hang on his wall or the lure of throwing shurikens into the wall of the garden shed was such an exciting thing for the boys, but they all seemed to love it.

My son and daughter get along well—until they don’t.   They seem to genuinely care for each other most of the time unless they’re in the middle of a disagreement.   The other day they each had a friend over to visit, my daughter, another girl from her class, and my son, his friend Gavin, who came to spend the night.    During that time the girls were off doing things that made them happy—which involved a lot of giggling.   The boys were busy being loud and jumping around, yelling and brandishing weapons at each other, declaring super powers and proclaiming domination over the other.

Later in the day when their friends had left to go home I came up to find a tea party set out on the bonus room table.   It would appear from the picture below, one of the boys had attended the tea party I’d seen the girls setting up earlier.   See if you can guess which seat he sat at:

The Big Boy Update:  At bedtime last night my son got into his bed, pulled the cover up to his neck and said to me, “do you know why I have tears in my eyes?”  I told him I didn’t know, was he feeling sad?   He said, “because I’m bored because Gavin isn’t here anymore.”   Gavin is a fun friend to have around (and at nine, my son looks up to him quite a bit).   I told him there was good news: Gavin was coming back in two days to visit again.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter and I were playing a game this morning for “Special Time”.   We’d spin a spinner and have to count the spaces until we reached the next cow or pig or tractor, etc.   I’ve noticed before she gets off with the numbers, but I thought it was her inability to see the board well.   This morning though she was always consistently one off, starting at the beginning of the counting.   I realized she was counting the space the piece was already on.   I tried explaining how you didn’t count that spot, you started with the next space.   She didn’t seem to get that explanation, which I thought was fairly straightforward, so I tried a different tactic.  I told her if she wanted to count the current position, she could start with zero and then one, two, etc.   That, she got and had not problem understanding.   The remainder of the game she counted every move correctly.