Concerning Isaac's gender ambivalence… I've been thinking about it since I posted that and feeling ill at ease. There are boys I've read about who really are in the position of being trapped in the wrong body. The ones who refuse to get their hair cut, change their names, and wear dresses exclusively. There are other boys who maintain their boyness, but wear, say, a long velvet gown while playing trucks. (One dad wrote about this in Parenting Magazine.) There are boys, such as the one written about recently on Babble.com, who insist on wearing pink sparkly tights and bell bottom jeans with ruffles and sequins.
Isaac is like none of these. Fashionwise he's pretty much a jeans and t-shirt kind of kid. He likes to wear khakis like his dad, and his black cowboy belt, and sometimes a tie and blazer for parties. His litany of boy interests is long and varied. Trucks, construction, transportation, guns-n-ammo, wars, sports of all kinds, superheroes of all kinds, rockets and space, dinosaurs, lizards, tree houses, bugs, etc., etc. He has one rather neglected doll. He never thinks about fairies and rarely expresses any interest in princesses.
Really the problem is not HIM. It's US. It's Toys R Us, with their starkly divided pink girl aisle. And every clothing store. And shoe store. And the movie theaters and cartoon industry, headed up by the Disney death star. I'm sure their marketing departments would defend themselves by saying that the children WANT to differentiate themselves in clearest terms. Maybe so, but it's a chicken and egg thing now and it's hard to say which came first.
One blog I read, Mimi Smartypants, has a similar problem with her tomboyish girl– who wants tighty-whitey Thomas underpants, a boy bike, and freaked out about her "beach cover up" when it suddenly occurred to her that it might secretly be a dress.
Isaac will figure it out. He's just in touch with his feminine side, and that's not a bad thing. We need sensitive men with a flare for fashion in this crazy world.
In other news we're home sick today– sore throats all around.
Elias can now say two words– Mama and Lena. I'm honored to be at the top of the list, and I'm sure Lena dog is pleased to be a close second. Also, he's really walking, step after step, three or even five in a row before toppling over. He can climb stairs in a twinkling.
Last night he actually choked. It was scary– but a long-ago CPR/first aid class we took when I was pregnant with Isaac kicked in. I turned Elias onto his stomach and smacked his back five times, hard. Didn't work. I repeated the process and the little square cracker popped out. Breathing resumed– his and mine and Ben's. We've been so lucky so far that he hasn't choked on all manner of choke-worthy things he's picked up and popped in his mouth!
I count our blessings once again.