perspective

I love how kids see the world so differently. And yet, sometimes I’m frightened by the degree to which my little girl allows, and invites, me to shape her perspective.

We’re going to Disneyland over the fourth week in April (Yay! Yay!!), which is thrilling enough in and of itself, but it’s especially awesome because we’re spending the week in a condo with my brother and his family. Which means Lizzy will have a ton of concentrated time with her four cousins. Five little Disney princesses. Should be quite an experience.

I’m hoping to get her a digital camera before we go. I’d love to see the world through her eyes; I’m pondering giving her some sort of scrapbook when we get back for her to paste her photos into. And stickers and the whole mess.

I’ve been telling her each day for the past four or five days: “Lizzy! Only X number of days until we fly in a plane to see your cousins.” (at first I was saying, “until we go to Disneyland,” but that’s not strictly true – we’ll arrive in the evening. She seems pretty thrilled with either turn of phrase, though.) She looks really excited, then stops and frowns, and pouts, and says: “But that’s too far away!” and looks as though she might cry. Wow. Seventeen days feels to me like about as long as it takes to boil water these days. Which is to say, almost no time at all. (maybe Lizzy's a pot-watching type.)

There’s a little boy named Jack at Lizzy’s school, in her class – I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned him or not. He’s quite the wee chauvinist pig. Which is weird, because I’ve chatted with his mom (though not about that) a bunch of times, and she seems like a fairly strong, confident female type. Jack’s got an older brother and a dad, so perhaps the ‘women are weaker’ spew comes from them. Lizzy’s told me that he says boys are better; boys are stronger (well, depending on your measure); only boys can drive cars (I tend to drive more than Matt does). It’s weird. I don’t want to turn Lizzy into a raging feminist, but I sure don’t want her to have some sort of gender-related inferiority complex at age 4. Plenty of time to develop either of those lines of thinking when she’s older and on her own.

She was really hung up the other night on the fact that Jack says that boys are stronger. I said, “Lizzy – you know how I’ve told you that only women can have babies, right? Men can’t?” She said, yes, she knows that. “Well, did you know that it hurts to have a baby?” She didn’t know that, but looked rather fascinated. “Well,” I said, “I bet that God knew that boys wouldn’t be able to handle it, so that’s why only girls can have babies. They’re strong enough, but boys aren’t.”

I’m probably going to have to do some clean-up on that one later. I’ll know I can only blame myself down the road when Lizzy refuses to give me any grandchildren – er, I mean, doesn’t want kids.

On the subject of her belief (or lack thereof) in God: We had a neat talk last night. Lizzy was telling me about how she must have told God that she wanted a mom ‘just like Kate,’ and a dad ‘just like Matt,’ and told him “Please please please! I want to be their little kid!” And God must have said yes, and given baby Lizzy to us.
I mean, how much sweeter does it get than THAT.