Gender...

5.25.2010

Gender is a curious thing. My little boy is beautiful. He has long, curly, blonde locks and an angelic smile that could easily compete with any little girl his age. Complete strangers tell me how beautiful and pretty he is, and since I still like to consider my 21 month old as my baby, I’m flattered by the comments. After all, he is my beautiful baby. However, I suppose in a few years beautiful will no longer be considered a compliment. In fact, he may grow to despise the word as boys are supposed to be handsome, rugged, strapping, and muscular—not beautiful!

Underneath this angelic aura, however, Little Lewie is all boy. By as early as his fourth month in this world, he showed me his taste for jokes by laughing at all my fart noises. The more disgusting the sound, the better, and by the seventh month, he was actually repeating these nauseating noises. Language, then and even now, is not important to him, but making sound effects—particularly strange, repulsive ones—is on the top of his list.

Here are a few other gender clues, which have surfaced before his second birthday. It’s no wonder that men and women seem to be from two different worlds.

9) He’s not afraid of bugs.

8) He likes to eat dirt, bark, and moss.
7) He likes to take things apart and figure out how they work mechanically.

6) He loves being messy. (His nails perpetually have dirt under them, which makes me question whether it’s not really dirt at all, but some sort of odd pigmentation he was born with…)

5) He loves to jump and play in mud puddles. In fact, he searches for them.

4) He loves all trucks and cars.

3) He’s fascinated by the most trivial things, such as the crack in the wall or the finger paintings he can make with his food.

2) He’s interested in learning how to drive. Thus, if I let him crawl in the driver’s seat while we are parked, he already knows where to place the keys, how to shift gears, how to honk the horn, and how to operate other car mechanisms. (I swear he knows more than I did as a sixteen years-old preparing for my driver’s license.)

1) He’s interested in grabbing and displaying his manhood.