Girls and Boys

My mother has always said 'anyone who claims that boys and girls are just the same hasn't had kids'. After one of each I tend to agree. The things Aoife does at 1 are things Euey doesn't have any interest in, even at 2 1/2. She has a doll, who she calls 'Baby' (the fact that Baby has a name is a huge difference - Euey said his first word (Dada) at 18 months). Baby gets toted around everywhere, pushed in the pram, brought to me for cuddles and taken for drives in Aoife's tip truck. When she cuddles Baby she pats her on the back. Admitedly she also puts poor Baby upside down in the pram and pushes hard to make sure she's in place, but still, that's a lot more interest than Euey showed in dolls.

When Aoife plays with Duplo (big Lego) she pulls out all the people, stands them up, then spends the whole time moving them from chair, to chair, to truck and back to chair. Euey, at that age, just wanted to pull apart everything I built. Even now that he can build real things like houses and rockets (with help) as soon as it's done he looks up with a wicked grin and says "I gonna broke it!" Breaking it, mind you, is not a simple act of pulling it apart, but requires a run to the floorboards and a huge throw to watch it smash all over the kitchen. Aoife kills herself laughing at this, but has yet to attempt it herself.

Aoife's first word after Mama and Dada (which have now become Mummy and Daddy) was 'shoe'. She still loves shoes. We took Euey to a shoe shop the other day to get some new sneakers. This was where the differences were highlighted. When we told Euey where we were going he responded with 'I don't need shoes'. Aoife, meanwhile, had picked up on one word and was sitting in her car seat with a huge grin repeating over and over 'shoe-shoe, shoe-shoe'. She was in heaven from the moment we set foot in the door, going from one shoe to another handing them all up to Dad and saying 'shoe-shoe'. Euey, on the other hand, looked like he couldn't imagine a worse place to be, he was dragging his bare feet and still chanting 'I don't need shoes, I don't need shoes'. Once he got over his hatred he proceeded to choose a pair of black very high heels, put them on and wander around a bit. I got them off him and was putting them away when I turned around to see him putting on a pair of pastel pink ballet shoes. Hmmm.

We got out of there in the end with a pair of sneakers that Euey has grown to accept and a pair of gumboots that Aoife won't take off (yeah, not very ladylike I know!).