Boys and Girls

Some things actually heard here in this house full of boys: "We do NOT sit on the kitchen table in our underwear!" (sidebar: if this has been repeated every day for the past three or four years, how long does it take the male mind to process this and finally comprehend - and act on - the notion of how disgusting this is?) "Darling, if you're going to shoot at him, you can't cry when he shoots back at you." I say this, too, almost daily, but somehow when I said it this morning it seemed particularly absurd! :-) From the five year-old to his six month-old brother, who was watching in blissful adoration, "Pow, pow, pow! [actually these were much more sophisticated, and therefore difficult to reproduce in writing, shooting sounds]. Now I shot you and you have to fall down. I'll help you..." Fortunately I caught the baby in time, and it was difficult, once again, to say, "You can't do that to the baby, and no, he doesn't 'like it' ", when the baby is smiling and evidently does think it's funny!
Meanwhile, the girl in our house is ever and always one of the most self-assured and determined young females I know - she is a princess in the finest sense of the word, in that she appreciates order and beauty, but she is also bold, confident, and adventuresome. She is excellent at bending people to her will and convincing them that they like it (and if not, that really they have no choice - Drew is under this spell especially and has to be reminded that Aimee actually has no authority over him!), and I haven't the least bit of doubt that she will always be able to stand her ground in almost any circumstance. I don't worry, certainly that she could be coerced into doing anything she didn't want to do. This, of course, poses daily challenges for her parents who are trying to raise her, but I confess I can't help but admire her spirit when she adamantly refuses, for instance, to have her finger pricked at the doctor's office, and in that instance, I wasn't much of a help to the nurse.
At any rate, during our art lesson yesterday, I think this spirited individual was showing her colors and deliberately missing the point - I could see it in the smiling, but challenging gleam in her blue eyes (which, by the way, are the kind that sparkle, smolder, and do all the other descriptive things that are written about eyes in books). The idea was to take a construction paper shape, glue it onto a white piece of paper, and then draw a picture around the shape. For instance, the circle could become a scoop of ice cream in a cone, or the wheel of a car, or the head of a cat, etc. Well, Aimee loves doing things a certain way, but usually it's her way, and I could tell that she instantly bucked the very idea of drawing according to a set of instructions. She wanted to argue a little about it, but I asked her just to try, and so she picked something to draw. She drew a stick person with the circle for the head, and then drew a rather nice and much more elaborate cat NEXT to the stick person. One of the art books I have used discourages using the words "right" or "wrong," and the like, so I said some encouraging things about the picture, then gave her a square and tried to reinforce the idea again, without disparaging the first picture. She took it a little too gladly, made the square a box in a pet shop. Next to the box she drew a very good and colorful parrot. By this time I was a little stressed ( also because despite my best efforts at inspiring individual creativity, Drew was attempting to copy Aimee's work exactly, and so no one seemed to be getting the idea of the thing at all ), and I complimented everyone's work a little half-heartedly, then let them go play. I was feeling a little frustrated at the lack of creativity I had hoped to see, then I realized how ridiculous I was being. For one, that little girl was doing it on purpose, I was fairly sure, and for another, there was nothing wrong with her creativity - she had drawn a couple of animals that were really quite good. All in all, her personality beamed through, and it sure is a great one!