Nature or Nurture

I'd like to think that Sue and I have been pretty even handed in how we approach child rearing with our kids. For instance, Cruz will claim his favorite color is pink, and that has never garnered any negative comments from us.  As for his toys, we made sure from an early age that he had some dolls, kitchen toys and other playthings usually associated with girls. That being said the preponderance of his toys are have turned out to be trains, cars, and other things traditionally defined as masculine.

Now we have Whitney. Through a combination of frugality and practicality we haven't been as aggressive about buying toys for her. There's only so much room to go around for things that will only be used for a few months to a year or so.

So that that means is that Whitney has been playing with a lot of trains and cars. Her imaginative play at first seemed to mirror that of Cruz. Some might say that this is to her benefit. But recently we've noticed a whole different side of Whitney, an almost maternal side. And all this without any real prompting from us.

I touched on it briefly when I talked about her inheriting my sister's Cabbage Patch Kid but for sometime Whitney has been entirely enamored by baby dolls. She cradles them and has to sleep with one. She likes to take them on walks in her little stroller. Whenever there's a real infant in a stroller or being carried she loves to point them out.

All of these activities came to a head one day when we were looking at pictures of Cruz' new preschool. To get him ready for his new environment, I started showing him (and Whitney) pictures of the facilities. Included in the pictures was one with a whole bunch of baby dolls on a shelf. If only you could have heard the gasp that she made when the picture came up, promptly followed by her pointing and exclaiming "BABIEEEEEEEEEES!!!! BABIEEEEEEEEES!!!!"

Fast forward a week or two when Cruz would start to actually go to this new school and Whitney finally got to play with some of these babies in all their glory.

"BABIEEEEEEEEEEES!!!!"

"I love babies."

"I think I see more babies over there!!!"