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Broke Wife, Big City
The difference
between raising boys and girls
By Aprill Brandon
Here’s a fun fact you might not know: Strangers love talking to
parents.
I mean, LOVE it. Every time I leave my house with my kids, we are
bombarded by strangers who ask all kinds of totally appropriate
questions, like, “Are those gingers!? Carol, look, she’s got two
gingers!” and “How did YOU end up with redheads? You don’t have red
hair. Tell me your family’s genealogy.” and “Oh, are you leaving? Hang
on, I want to rub your kid’s hair for good luck.”
Once we’ve exhausted the hair topic, however, these strangers almost
always move onto the subject of raising boys vs. girls, since the other
outstanding feature of my two kids is that they are opposite genders.
And let me tell you, I have learned so much. Most of it against my
will. But all this unsolicited advice has made me pay closer attention
to the biological differences of my own offspring.
Here’s a good example. My son, who is 3, always wants to wrestle with
me. My daughter, who is 14 months, always wants to wrestle the dog. So,
clearly, all those people who say girls are smarter are correct. The
dog always lets Mae win. I, however, have a good 90 pounds on my son
and do an amazing flying elbow move from the couch.
So far, I’ve won 378 times and Riker has won zero.
And that’s only the tip of the iceberg in the vast ocean of their
gender-based differences. They both have very different views of
danger, for instance. He tries his best every day to kill himself by
jumping erratically around on his bed (in fact, he views that song,
“Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed,” as more of a how-to guide
than a cautionary tale). She, meanwhile, is determined to kill herself
by climbing to the top of our tall unsecured bookshelves.
I don’t know how much research has been done in terms of chromosomes
and food preferences but I can tell you he loves chicken nuggets and
hates vegetables. But SHE loves cheese and hurling whatever else is on
her plate across the room. And once she runs out of everything else,
she’ll hurl the cheese.
She is by far is the gentler of the two, always making sure to hug me
after she smacks me full-on in the face and knocks my glasses off my
face. He, on the other hand, will only hug me after hitting me if he
draws blood. Although, granted, that could be more of an age thing.
He’s a toddler, which basically means he’s a tiny psychopath, and she’s
a baby, so leans more toward sociopathy.
Like any typical boy, Riker loves to play with cars. Mae, on the other
hand, only wants to play with cars if they are her brother’s cars. She
completely ignores the cars we bought specifically for her, choosing
instead to use his to repeatedly run over her baby doll’s face.
Riker is definitely the funnier one, but Mae will occasionally do
something she personally finds hilarious, like taking off her diaper
and peeing on a pile of clean clothes.
Now, my daughter did start walking sooner than her brother...I think. I
kind of fudged the facts in their baby books because I forgot to fill
them out at an appropriate time (literally didn’t even crack them open
before their first birthdays) and so just kind of winged it. As for
talking, it’s hard to pinpoint when Riker started because he pretty
much came out of the womb talking gibberish, which eventually turned
into English, but since he never stopped to take a breath, I’m unsure
when he said his first word. I do know his first sentence was “that’s
not cheese” and her second word was “cheese,” so that right there shows
you that I feed both genders way too much cheese.
Color-wise, they both seem pretty ambivalent about the whole pink and
blue thing. When jumping full-bodied into a giant mud puddle, neither
one seems to care what color their clothes are. But who knows? Maybe
they would care more if their mother wasn’t such a feminist. But at
least Riker is the more sports-oriented one. At his soccer games, he is
on the actual field when he decides to lay down and play dead while his
sister is busy licking soccer balls on the sidelines.
It just goes to show you. Men really are from Mars, women are from
Venus, and children are from Uranus.
Heh.
Can’t get enough of Aprill? Can’t wait until next week?
Check out her website at http://aprillbrandon.com/
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