My daughter is unique in many ways. She enjoys wearing dresses and putting on make-up and likes her princesses. She loves to dance and have her toe nails painted. She also loves non-typical girl things. Bugs, volcanoes, tornadoes, trucks, transformers. We encourage her interest in pretty much everything. She's a girl who will climb a tree while wearing a pretty dress, who will dig for worms or pick stink-pretty flowers. She can draw a picture of a lovely garden and then draw a monster. I love that.
Valentine's Day is coming up and she picked out these lovely bug cards. At first I was like, cool. But then I started remembering how other girls would say things to her about bugs being gross or screaming, and then Ariana would fall into that for a brief period. I know there are some girly-girls in her class who will most likely not care for the bug cards and some other girls who will love them too. So, do I have her give bug cards to the boys and some of the girls, and other cards to the other girls?
My worry is that other girls will tell her she's weird for liking those things, or fall into the screaming pattern that some females seem to have about bugs. What if Ariana takes that to heart and loses interest? I can encourage her to follow her heart. And if she stops like bugs or whatever, that's okay. As long as she stops because they truly don't interest her anymore, not because someone told her that girls don't like that kind of stuff.
4 comments:
Eeps. I think I'd buy some of both kinds of Valentine's to give out.
That's a toughie.
I think you're thinking way too much into this. The kids really don't care. When the boys bring home the princess ones from the girls, all they care about is either WHO it was from, or what CANDY was attached to it.
Do you honestly remember back to anytime where you judged a kid for what kind of card they gave you for V-day? No, all any of us cared about was that we had a bag/box full of cards, and many of them had candy. Except, the scratch & sniff ones were pretty cool, but I don't remember who gave them out.
Let her have the bugs. If the other girls don't like them, they're just sissies. ;)
Reading this post and the one your wrote about "Girl Power" makes me think a lot back to school and I think we think along the same lines. I personally stuggled with not being in the "in" crowd and it hurts to get left out of things. And I see some of those thing already happening to Luke and he's only in kindergarten. He loves tractors & trucks and that is all he plays with. He comes home and says he doesn't have friends because no one likes playing the things he does. Like you I encourage him to follow his heart and do what he enjoys. On that note I say give all the kids bug valentines because that is what Arianna wants to give them.
Lisa
Thanks ladies. I'm going to have her give the bug cards, and use the Mickey ones I got for myself. ;)
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