You throw like a girl

I love being the mom of a little girl. The clothes are adorable, the toys are familiar, and I have visions of sharing special times together in the future doing girly things like getting our toes pampered at a nail salon. But with all the adorable pinkness that has taken over the family of fish in the past year, I was quite ready to hear the words "It's a boy!" at our 20 week ultrasound.

It strikes me now that we've got a lot of adjusting to do come January (or soon thereafter). For all the talk of how boys and girls are basically the same and are simply conditioned to be either male or female by their parents and their environment, I must say the so-called experts seem to have missed the mark.

Case in point: Abby has, all on her own and (purposefully) without any encouragement from me, decided that pushing her baby doll around in this stroller is a fun thing to do. I have made a determined effort to neither encourage or discourage this type of play, mostly to see how she would develop this skill on her own. I've even tried putting other things in the stroller--magnets, plastic blocks, sippy cups--to see if she was content to use it as more of an all-purpose vehicle. The answer is no. She consistently pushes my suggested item into her playroom, removes it, and inserts a baby doll or some cuddly stuffed animal in its place, then returns to the kitchen to push her charge around the island until I get the point: "Mom, babies go in strollers. Not blocks." To add to the cute femininity, she'll occassionally stop to feed her baby doll a drink from its tiny pink plastic bottle, or occassionally share a sip of whatever she has in her sippy cup. I didn't teach her that.

I have yet to talk to the mom of a boy whose son dedicates the amount of waking hours to caring for his stuffed animals that my daughter does. Sure, they'll drive things around too. Cars mostly, or those little ride on trucks. Even, on occassion, a toy vacuum cleaner (although I'm fairly certain they'd prefer the bubble blowing lawn mower). But a stroller with a baby in it? Nope; the closest I've come is a mom whose son uses his sister's stroller as a transport vehicle for Matchbox cars.

So could it be true? Could there be some innate difference in boys and girls that is part of their basic genetic make-up and not just something they're taught to be? I'm firmly convinced the answer is yes. Sure, there are girls out there who enjoy traditionally male activities. I'm certain our daughter will be one of them, because I know her dad isn't going to let her miss out on fishing trips and backyard soccer games. And there are boys who are enjoy some traditionally female activities. You'd better believe my son will be right there next to me helping Abby and I stir batches of brownie batter when he's old enough. But at our very core, there is something that makes girls distinctly feminine and boys distinctly masculine. And you can bet the family of fish won't be fighting those instincts. On the contrary, we're looking forward to encouraging our son and daughter to embrace who God made them as male and female, and not as some androgynous robots that we'll train to cook and clean or hunt and gather.

And when Abby uses Caleb's tonka trucks to drive her families of dolls around the backyard and Caleb commandeers her stroller to collect his Lego's, we'll share a collective sigh with parents everywhere who understand that boys and girls are just different.