The difference between boys and girls

This is becoming more evident and real for me since I am the only female in a family of 5.

On Sunday night we went out as a family to dinner, the table number stand had a pivot base and stood up about 10 cms with a clip at the top. Just before dessert, I started moving the top and turning it, then handing it over to my son (age 7), I said “here you go, why don’t you drive this like a car?” (as it looked like a gear lever to me). My son’s eyes lit up, “No, it’s a plane and it shoots”, there he sat turning the top and making shooting sounds, while I sat amazed and enchanted by his imagination which is obviously totally different to mine.

A similar thing had happened two weeks ago. I walked into my children’s playroom to find their whiteboard filled with words, written in neat columns. I thought to myself, wow, my boys have been hard at work learning and how great it was they found another use for the whiteboard. I remarked to my boys, “I see there a list of words on the whiteboard, that’s great work, fantastic, which of you wrote them?” My eldest son (age 9) says, “G* did that.” G* is a friend from school, a girl, who had come to play the day before. Mmm, backtrack mum, “Oh that’s great", I responded. Well the list lasted four days before being wiped clean by my boys and making way for swirls, pictures and the occasional ‘hangman’ game.

So these are my most recent examples of how boys and girls differ and that it’s okay to accept your child for who they are and relish what their imagination conjures up.