I picked my six-year-old grandson up from first grade yesterday, as my daughter was in San Diego on business. We stopped at the Dos Lagos shopping mall so that I could buy him a promised Webkinz toy which he needed to register to play games on the Webkinz website. You have to have a Webkinz stuffed animal (with a code number) to register. But Grandma couldn't remember the name of the store that has the Webkinz toys, nor could Mason for that matter, so we walked down one side of the outside mall and up the other until we found the store. Then Grandma remembered that there is a man-made lake at this mall with a bridge, and as it was a warm day here in souhern California, it seemed like a good idea to take a walk around the lake and over the bridge. Mason had no objection to this. There were some flowers growing near the lake, not too many and not too attractive, but nice enough to take some pictures. I got out my camera. "Only girls take pictures of flowers," Mason declared, "Boys lie on the couch and watch television." Hmm, I thought, he's sounding a lot like his grandfather. I said nothing. He must have reconsidered his position, because about a minute later he said, "Girls take pictures of flowers; boys just walk along."
Today I picked him up again. "You know, lots of grown men take beautiful pictures of flowers and put them on Flickr," I told him. "Well, it's a girlish thing," he said. We were on our way to Wal-Mart to buy him a basketball and a portable hoop.
2 comments:
Hmmm. Yes, there is a certain age when boys are eager not to be mistaken for girls.
But grown men take also pictures of cars, tall buildings and basketball games, don't they? Flowers may be a girlish thing, but photography is not :-)
Very true! It is also true that girls do not want to be thought to be like boys. When I was six years old, my mother, without consulting me, bought me a lunch box for school. It was the old fashioned metal type that came with a thermos bottle. It had pictures of space ships and space traverlers on it! I was mortified!
The fact that one of the space travelers was a woman wearing a skirt did nothing to mollify me. I should say here that this was before the time of Sputnik and moon landings, so space travel was pure science fiction, and something that only boys thought about. I hated that lunch box; in fact I refused to take the thermos out (lest anybody see it) but would pour my milk into the plastic top which served as a cup, and then stand the thermos back in the lunch box, where it was hidden from view. One time one of the boys asked me why I didn't take the thermos out of the lunch box ... I was too embarrassed to even answer him.
Oddly, I never told my mother that I didn't like the lunch box; seems I didn't want to hurt her feelings.
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