First Marshmallow!
And she loved it. Of course. More proof that she is in fact my flesh and blood.
We went to the Van Kleefs tonight for Lights in the Heights. We didn’t walk around at all, but just driving down the streets was a lot of fun. Carson is way more into Christmas lights and decorations this year. I love this neighborhood. It might be my favorite in Houston.
Shallan has a bunch of her old Barbie stuff and the Hartman girls were playing with it tonight. Carson went in there to play with them, which doesn’t bother me at all. I don’t care if he plays with Barbies at the age of 3…13 and I might start to worry. At one point he held up a toy mirror and told those of us standing in the kitchen that it was his “shooter”. All boy. I know some people have this idea that our culture fosters behavior in boys and girls as far as what toys they play with and how we encourage certain behaviors as the appropriate ones for their gender. Which may be true to some extent, but in having a son and a daughter I can already see gender differences that I did not encourage, and from an early age. I haven’t discouraged Carson from playing with dolls (I bought him a pink baby doll before Betsy was born) and he loves the tea set Betsy got for her birthday, and Betsy has no choice but to play with cars, trucks and tools because we have a lot of that stuff around. But Carson still turns things into guns and bangs things together and Betsy sweetly pats her stuffed animals and dolls…and she bangs things together. But there are definitely differences between girls and boys that are just innate.
