I remember once listening to a radio show discussing behavioral differences between girls and boys, and a mother called in to share a story about her daughter. Apparently, the girl’s parents gave her a truck to play with one day; the little girl thanked her parents and ran off happily to play with her new toy. The parents congratulated themselves on successfully bucking gender norms…and then peeked in on their girl to find her lovingly tucking her truck into bed and kissing it goodnight.

Now, I took that radio program and that story (cute as it was) with a grain of salt because I really believe that whatever innate gender characteristics we possess are ultimately hugely affected by our individual experiences. In my opinion, there are as many kinds of people as…there are people.

That said, I have to tell you that my newest little kid is proving to be about as “Boy” as an 8-month-old boy can be.

His sister was a very low-key baby. She was barely crawling before she turned one—she seemed to embrace the attitude of “Why am I going to crawl when I can just sit here and let people bring me things?” And once she finally learned to crawl, she did it very conscientiously: if I told her “no” a couple times, she somehow seemed to understand. The fact that we never quite got all the drawer locks installed was a non-issue.

Essentially, she gave me absolutely no experience whatsoever in dealing with a mobile infant…and that’s exactly what her brother has turned out to be: Mobile. With a capital M.

He crawls. (Quickly.) He climbs. (Incessantly.) He does not walk. (Yet.) But just the other day he jumped. (JUMPED!) He pulled himself up on the coffee table and jumped straight up in the air like he’d been doing it all his life. He does a pretty accurate imitation of a spider monkey, and we’ve begun having to double-team him for diaper changes.

“He’s all boy,” people keep saying to me…and I’m suddenly, surprisingly inclined to agree. At any rate, we’ll be putting in the rest of those drawer locks very, very soon.

Posted by Shannon, a Dot-arilla Blogger

Tags: Mom Talk, Shannon's Blogs
Posted in : Babies, Mom Talk, Shannon's Blogs