Real Life Moments
Stepping away from fandom-stuff for a moment. Feel free to ignore my mommy-whining. XD
I know I'm probably worrying too much about this. In fact, I know I am. I'm making mountains out of molehills.
But it kind of got my attention.
My daughter brought home a "Special Me" book from school yesterday. (She's in grade 1.) It is a little book she made in class. Each day in their class, for the first month of school, there was a 'Special Me' student chosen to be the Helper of the Day etc. It looks like the class filled in one page (of the little book) for each person for each day they were Special Me.
Now I admit, I may be missing something b/c I've been so sick these past few days, but I just flipped through the book now, and a few things struck me.
- Good gods I need to work with my daughter on her spelling & penmanship.
- I am so proud of her for writing on each page, b/c I can tell she's doing her best.
- An inordinate number of kids listed noodles or pasta as their favourite thing ever.
- All but one girl listed their favourite thing as 'pink'.
- My daughter was the only girl who didn't list her favourite thing as 'pink'. (She loves cats. I refuse to have a cat. She knows this and tries to emotionally blackmail me into getting her one.)
- Not a single kid listed their favourite thing as either books or stories.
I know I was a bit odd growing up (my favourite thing on any Fav List I ever wrote was 'books', and has been this way consistently from age 2.5 --> age 30), but... I think I'd feel just as out-of-place if I were in my daughter's class (and age 6 again), as I felt growing up in my own classes.
I know my daughter loves pink, but the fact that she didn't list it as her Favourite thing is what strikes me in this. I tried really hard to expose her to all kinds of different attitudes / ideas / philosophies from her birth, so she could see what was out there; as opposed to flooding her with princess-related material. I didn't deprive her of the Princess Experience (my own capitalization), however I didn't make it her only option. My daughter loves dress-up. But she loves goth-lolita dress-up. She loves gross things, morbid things, mummies, archaeology, dinosaurs, and heaven help us all, she LOVES the human body and all the creepy, weird, gross things about it. (Much to my family's glee and my perpetual weak-stomach'ed unholy demise.) She has pop-up books and full 300-page texts about the human body and the mummification processes for civilizations from across the world. That whole pulling-brain-out-through-the-nose? Oh yeah, *big spread* on that process gets a full expandable, moving-pop-up dedication in one of her books. I nearly fainted the first time she ran up to me to show me. (You'd think after spending a year in med school and dissecting a human brain, I'd be unable to get grossed out? Not so! Surprise bloody surprise....)
She also enjoys math and can do a surprising amount of it in her head.
For her fifth birthday, when most girls want a Barbie or Princess birthday party, we had a Mad Science slime-fest extravaganza, complete with rocket launch and dry-ice mist-showers.
And she *likes* this stuff.
But more and more, I see her moving towards the Barbie things, and the Princess stuff when we go shopping.
I admit she has had a hard time making friends (many have moved, and now we've moved, and she's rarely had girl friends, it's usually been boy friends), but she's such a good kid, I want her to be able to relate to her peers.
And I think that's what's driving her (a bit) to go more Barbie-crazy. Not that she wasn't Barbie-crazy before, but since she started school, it has reached Truly Annoying Proportions.
But I think I can see, now, that it's not just her -- it's also the fact that she wants to fit in.
... which leaves me wondering if there's a Barbie out there where you can skin her and take apart her insides to learn her organs.
That, I could live with.
I know I'm probably worrying too much about this. In fact, I know I am. I'm making mountains out of molehills.
But it kind of got my attention.
My daughter brought home a "Special Me" book from school yesterday. (She's in grade 1.) It is a little book she made in class. Each day in their class, for the first month of school, there was a 'Special Me' student chosen to be the Helper of the Day etc. It looks like the class filled in one page (of the little book) for each person for each day they were Special Me.
Now I admit, I may be missing something b/c I've been so sick these past few days, but I just flipped through the book now, and a few things struck me.
- Good gods I need to work with my daughter on her spelling & penmanship.
- I am so proud of her for writing on each page, b/c I can tell she's doing her best.
- An inordinate number of kids listed noodles or pasta as their favourite thing ever.
- All but one girl listed their favourite thing as 'pink'.
- My daughter was the only girl who didn't list her favourite thing as 'pink'. (She loves cats. I refuse to have a cat. She knows this and tries to emotionally blackmail me into getting her one.)
- Not a single kid listed their favourite thing as either books or stories.
I know I was a bit odd growing up (my favourite thing on any Fav List I ever wrote was 'books', and has been this way consistently from age 2.5 --> age 30), but... I think I'd feel just as out-of-place if I were in my daughter's class (and age 6 again), as I felt growing up in my own classes.
I know my daughter loves pink, but the fact that she didn't list it as her Favourite thing is what strikes me in this. I tried really hard to expose her to all kinds of different attitudes / ideas / philosophies from her birth, so she could see what was out there; as opposed to flooding her with princess-related material. I didn't deprive her of the Princess Experience (my own capitalization), however I didn't make it her only option. My daughter loves dress-up. But she loves goth-lolita dress-up. She loves gross things, morbid things, mummies, archaeology, dinosaurs, and heaven help us all, she LOVES the human body and all the creepy, weird, gross things about it. (Much to my family's glee and my perpetual weak-stomach'ed unholy demise.) She has pop-up books and full 300-page texts about the human body and the mummification processes for civilizations from across the world. That whole pulling-brain-out-through-the-nose? Oh yeah, *big spread* on that process gets a full expandable, moving-pop-up dedication in one of her books. I nearly fainted the first time she ran up to me to show me. (You'd think after spending a year in med school and dissecting a human brain, I'd be unable to get grossed out? Not so! Surprise bloody surprise....)
She also enjoys math and can do a surprising amount of it in her head.
For her fifth birthday, when most girls want a Barbie or Princess birthday party, we had a Mad Science slime-fest extravaganza, complete with rocket launch and dry-ice mist-showers.
And she *likes* this stuff.
But more and more, I see her moving towards the Barbie things, and the Princess stuff when we go shopping.
I admit she has had a hard time making friends (many have moved, and now we've moved, and she's rarely had girl friends, it's usually been boy friends), but she's such a good kid, I want her to be able to relate to her peers.
And I think that's what's driving her (a bit) to go more Barbie-crazy. Not that she wasn't Barbie-crazy before, but since she started school, it has reached Truly Annoying Proportions.
But I think I can see, now, that it's not just her -- it's also the fact that she wants to fit in.
... which leaves me wondering if there's a Barbie out there where you can skin her and take apart her insides to learn her organs.
That, I could live with.