Last March, my wife and I discovered that we were going to have a baby. Despite being recently laid off, the crap economy, and the general insanity that comes with a child I was rather excited.
For you see as all parents do I saw this as a two stage adventure in which to mold someone into a perfect being.
The first stage is what I'll call "The Minion Stage". Essentially having a little tiny henchman who does as their told and will make Manhattans for you. I've even started buying the smaller bottles of Canadian Club so he can lift it sooner. But, during this stage you do more than boss him around, you also prepare him for stage two...
"The Coolest Person on the Planet Stage". This is the butterfly to the minion's pupa. You see while they've been your henchmen you've been taking them to see "the right movies" while shunning musicals about High School that I'm sure he won't want to see anyways. Pokemon? Yu-Gi-oh? Whatever is popular now? Pshh. Ignore that! You've been showing him original seasons of G1 Transformers, GI Joe, MASK, and Thundercats on DVD, his taste is too refined for modern cartoons (save a handful of good ones). And of course he's never even heard of The Wiggles because for him he hears cartoons and bands and he thinks of Dethklok. He'll know the complete songbook of Dean Martin before he hears "Baby Beluga" for the first time! And on his 10th birthday you and him will sit down with a big bucket of Popcorn and throw the classic of the Horror/Action/Sci-Fi genre "Predator" into the wall screen (I figure we'll have wall screens in 10 years) and bond like no father and son ever did before. Then, when he is ready to enter High School, he will such a cultured, educated and all around awesome lady-killer they'll have thought James Bond himself had enrolled.
Then we found out we were having a girl.
Hrm. If I was wrong about the sex of the child, could I have been wrong about any of my other plans for her? Possibly.
In our birthing class (more on that down the road) they had an exercise for us where we took 14 different two sided cards and we laid out our "ideal" birth scenario. IV/No IV, Drugs/No Drugs, etc.. We slowly whittled it down until everyone in the class (should have) had Healthy Baby as the only card remaining. The point of the exercise is that while you may have a vision of the perfect birth, only one thing is truly important and very little of it you actually control.
So the news that I was having a girl made me rethink my whole plan. To be fair it was a bit of a relief. In my mind I was going to have the coolest son on earth, but there was a part of me that thought, "Am I just making the biggest dork in his school district?". As a nerd/collector/movie buff/artist/designer I have a lot of interests. So if I were to lay out my cards I'd have many ideal scenarios for the next 18 years of what I need to do with my daughter but as I whittle them down only one really important question remained...
When should she see Die Hard?
So please visit here often to see how I'm doing with my newest full time job, and help me figure out the answer to that, and other questions.
-GD
I don't see any reason why you'd have to change your plans one whit just because li'l Minion is a girl. She needs to know all these things too, and "boy toys" are always much more interesting than "girl toys".
ReplyDeleteYou'll have to expend more energy keeping the ultimate evils of Bratz, Barbies, Twilight, and Disney nymphets away from her, but get her hooked on the cool stuff young and that'll help immunize her against it. How can a doll that you can change clothes on compare with a car that turns into a robot?
Otherwise, don't change a thing, especially the Dean Martin vs. Baby Beluga.
I was raised by folks who didn't change their music listening at all -- Dino, Ol' Blue Eyes, etc. are some of the earliest songs I memorized. My older brother made sure I knew the Beatles and Pink Floyd, and Star Trek TOS. I think Bayhem beats romcom any day.
Never cared much for dolls but somehow I managed to grow up adequately interested in men (and vice versa)and can still cook and iron and do all that married stuff.
So: carry on with the plan. The rest of society will indoctrinate her into girly-girl thoughts, but only you can save her from that limited world view.
-- Evil Tortie's Mom
That is just so beautiful. It almost makes me want to have children.
ReplyDeleteEvil Tortie... This is precisely why I started this blog. These are the discussions and the advice I want to hear and have shared. I will probably do a post off of your comment if you don't mind.
ReplyDeleteI had barbies AND transformers as a child... Now, I'm a sci-fi nerd who can properly apply lip gloss. I think my mom found it funny to torture me and my sister with Raffi after we already sang along with our parents' music collection. (Which covered most genres... Bob Marley to Ella Fitzgerald to Pink Floyd to John Prine and everywhere in between.)
ReplyDeleteI was very into Star Wars starting at a young age, but I had nightmares after seeing the parents get captured in the Ewok movie. Afterward all movies were screened before I could see them. When my sister and I were teenagers, screening movies was easy. If the only reason for the R rating was language (like My Cousin Vinny or something), we could see it. Violence was next, so we saw Reservoir Dogs before seeing any movie with sex or drug use. My sister thought it was hilarious that she saw Res Dogs before Forrest Gump, but my dad had a problem with the scene where Jenn-y does heroin and almost jumps off the building. Funny thing is, Die-Hard was not in their collection...I finally saw it last year, I'm 28.
Books were the larger influence, both parents are into sci-fi/fantasy. One of them would read every book we read, to keep an eye on us, and to make sure none of the books were Twilight-stupid. We definitely had lil' minion status..I was taught to make coffee so I could bring it to their bedside at about 7. My sister was taught to properly blend and pour margaritas at about 12, she thought they tasted terrible...
So, girl, boy, it doesn't matter. Encourage the (good) nerdiness, but don't force it upon her. You don't want watching High School Musical to be her idea of a revolt...