Feb 27 2006
You are SO lucky. Girls are so much easier than boys. (Hiiii-YA!)
As a mother of all girls, I hear this quite frequently. How lucky I am (yes, I am, no doubt) and how much easier girls are than boys. HA! Right. I can’t speak for having boys, but I can perhaps clear up any misconceptions about having girls.
The biggest one is around level of physical activity. There is this perception that girls sit quietly with their dollies and have tea parties. Yeah, that doesn’t happen very often. When there are tea parties, they are generally very messy affairs involving something that Oxiclean won’t get out of light tan carpeting along with a notable failure to obtain parental permission.
People never seem to imagine little girls as being rambunctious. I have a nine and a four year old and their favorite game is Drive Mommy Crazy By Running Through The House Doing Pretend Sword Fights. They play this all the time. Sometimes the swords are the cardboard inserts from paper towels or wrapping paper, but more often they are magic wands or twirling batons or brooms or mops. And as we all know, sword fighting involves jumping up and down from the furniture and lots of noise-making.
Last weekend, we were in KARATE mode. The four year old is running around showing off her karate moves, kicks, chops, jumps. The baby, a mere 22 months old, can clearly mimic the “Hi-YA!” while kicking (and falling) and chopping her chubby little hands through the air. The 9 year old is quite pleased with herself, having imparted all these mad karate skillz to her sisters.
Twice in the past dozen years, I’ve taken a child to the doctor for a corneal abrasion, both times causes by a sister. Once a frilly prissy girl had taken a spill from the monkey bars and broke her arm. That same prissy frilly girl got in trouble in 3rd grade for kicking a male school chum square in the nuts (on purpose!) We’ve had ankles x-rayed after wicked jumps from high places and we’ve sent many a girl child to her room for overt rambunctiousness (did I just make up another word???) with the stern warning “Go have a quiet tea party or something, DAMMIT. Didn’t you know girls were supposed to be EASIER?”
Right now with the three I have left under this roof to lead into adulthood, one of them is into forgery, another is into thievery, and the third is into assault and battery. My husband used to tell me “You change their diapers, I’ll bail them out of jail when they’re teenagers.” I once thought he was giving me the stinky end of that bargain (stinky? diapers? get it? haha!) but now I’m quite sure he will have the most work to do, given their criminal tendencies.
I’m really not so sure there is much of a difference between boys and girls. In fact, I don’t think it matters how many you have or what their ages or genders are. The truth is that having a child can run you ragged. Having children will run you ragged. Boys are inclined to drive their mothers crazy. Girls are inclined to drive their mothers nuts.
And the truth is we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Waaaaaaaaaah!! Why did my sidebar migrate south? I’ve kept the thermostat at a cozy 72 degrees.
Come back, little sidebar, come back. I’ll make you rice krispy treats!!!!
HA! I totally figured it out and fixed it. TOTALLY. Look at me go, getting all into the HTML like I know what the fuck I’m doing. But I totally DID it! Can you believe it?
Now I’ll have to eat all these rice krispy treats MYSELF.
