Further Proof That Girls Will Be Girls

Now, it shouldn't be said that I have been actively trying to turn Norah into a tomboy. I have never insisted that she play with Gabe's toys and be denied anything "girly." Well, I do refuse to dress her in anything pink, but I also refused to dress Gabe in anything light blue until he was old enough for that light blue to be incorporated into designs or patterns on his clothes and it wasn't obvious that he was wearing "boy" clothing. But that is beside the point. Kind of.

I DID, however, not-so-secretly hope that she would end up being a tomboy of her own choosing. I hoped this for a number of reasons, but the most important of these was that she would willingly CHOOSE to play with Gabe's toys and wear his hand-me-down clothes, saving us a butt ton of money in the long run.

However, much to the chagrin of both me and my wallet, Norah seems to be proving that some, probably most, girls are hardwired to be girly and like girly things. Despite the fact that she has innumerable boy toys to play with, she will always gravitate towards the girly stuff. I've already covered her love of baby dolls previously, but we also recently uncovered her proclivity for tea parties.

Last night, in a bout of what can only be called brief insanity, I decided that it would be a good idea to go out and find Gabe some more Legos. They have been offering him HOURS of distraction, and anything that can keep him busy for that long is, in my books, a toy worth having more of. But all of the sets that we got him for Christmas were vehicles of some sort, and he still hasn't lost his love of building the first structure that he learned how to build: the "castle." The castle can be anything and any shape, as long as blocks are stacked on top of one another high enough that knocking them down elicits some sort of joy from him.

Sadly, all of the vehicle sets included mostly fiddly little pieces--decidedly NOT the kind of thing one would build a castle with. There were almost no traditional rectangular lego blocks. You know the ones, with the eight pegs on the top. Standard lego. In the four or five sets we'd picked him up, there was ONE of those blocks. My plan was to go out and buy a bag or box of simple, basic shaped pieces so that he could easily build "castles."

Guess what. They don't sell those. No such thing as a "basic" set of Legos anymore. All they sell are the sets that must be built into something specific. In effect, Legos have become little more than model kits that can be taken apart and put back together again. Kind of fun, but at the same time, rather limiting I think. Because, let's face it, if you have a very small, curved, thin piece that is supposed to be incorporated into the bumper of a fire engine, there aren't many other uses one could come up for something so specific. So most of those fiddly bits are useless unless they are being used to build the thing they were designed to be a part of.

Sorry. Ranting.

But, since we were out, we decided to go ahead and pick him up a few more of the vehicle sets because we found some on sale. It was a "buy 2 get 1 free" sale that covered an entire section of an aisle. So, besides the Lego sets, there were tons of other things. We picked Gabe up two sets and, for the freebie, decided to get Norah something.

Without much trouble, we settled on a tea set. We saw her spend about an hour playing with the one at my folks' house and figured it was a can't miss option. And we didn't miss. She LOVED it. When we got home, she played for the rest of the evening with the set.

Libby set the dolls up for the party, but Norah knew exactly what to do with them--and keep in mind, this is the first tea party she's had since she's been old enough to kind of remember doing things! She just KNEW what to do! Really, she's setting women back over a hundred years here, proving pretty definitively that women are naturally inclined to host parties and serve others. I'm not proud of that finding, but I am inclined to ask Libby to get me things from the fridge more often now. It's kind of her biological imperative. Hurray for nature!

And a video of her playing with the stuff. You can tell by the noise the cups make that this is a porcelain set--probably a big mistake. By this morning they had already managed to break the handle off one of the cups. Oh well. Porcelain shards aren't sharp or dangerous, right? Especially when they are coming from something that a one year old has already trained herself to put into her mouth to simulate drinking. Right?