Teach This?: Gender Identity

My son just got pink socks. Yesterday, I pushed him around the block on his tricycle and he was wearing his dump truck shirt, sweat shorts, pink socks and sneakers. I don’t like admitting I had a hard time with it. Quite frankly, I’m uncomfortable with the dump truck shirt as well as the pink socks. My son’s not the one with a problem; I am. How is it possible that there’s a color my son’s not supposed to like because of his gender? Or that his obsession with construction equipment is more socially acceptable because he’s a boy?

I never imagined I’d be dealing with gender identity issues with a two-year-old. Really, though, they started when I found out I was having a boy. I put all of the pink hand-me-downs away. I told myself it was because I never wanted him to wonder later if I’d wished for a girl. Now, I’m wondering if that was really my motivation. I mean really, why couldn’t he wear a pink onesie?

A friend of mine ended up dressing her daughter in less tomboyish clothes than she’d expected to. She was surprised by how disturbed she was when people mistook her daughter for a boy. I was never bothered when people would look at Cavanaugh and say I had a beautiful girl. He is beautiful. What did I care if they thought he was a girl? But recently, Cavanaugh took his stuffed duck into a store and hugged the duck as we shopped. He loves the bow on top of the duck’s head. Since we didn’t have any bows, Cavanaugh asked me to put one of my glittery barrettes in his hair. When we got to the checkout, Cavanaugh pressed his head against the duck’s so the bow and barrette would touch. I felt myself explaining to the cashier that my son likes barrettes. Why? I don’t explain when Cavanaugh carries a train into the store with us?

Cavanaugh loves trucks, tools, and trains. He also feeds his pink and white stuffed bunnies, leans into books to smell the pictures of flowers, and already has his own power drill. He wears barrettes and bracelets. I’m sure all the years of growing up in a boys-don’t-cry country are feeding me the messages that some of these behaviors are appropriate, while others are not. While I am fighting the voices in my head, I’m also keeping them to myself (well, and sharing them with you). In the meantime, I’m trying to avoid indoctrinating Cavanaugh into any notions of gender roles I carry around and just let him like what he likes.

Teach This? Naming Myself

I inadvertently named myself “Me.” I did it every time I asked, “Do you want me to make you some breakfast?” or “Do you want me or Daddy to read the book to you?”

Even though Cavanaugh’s first word was “Mama,” he hasn’t said it in months. He says “Daddy” all the time. At first, I wrote it off to the fact that Cavanaugh and I are together 95% of the time so he doen’t really have a need to say “Mama.” When I’m not home and he wants me, he makes the sign for milk to tell Mike he’s ready for me to get back. But, I recently realized Cavanaugh doesn’t even think of Mama as my name. He was struggling out of my husband’s arms and saying, “Me” as he pointed to, you guessed it, me. Possibly because Mike had asked, “Do you want to go with me?” and Cavanaugh thought he was getting into my car.

Now when Mike asks, “Do you want to help me?” Cavanaugh comes to see what I’m doing. When my son wants more bagel, he calls “Me” to get it for him. He points to me and says, “Me.”

How could I have not known this and suddenly it’s everywhere, all the time? I want to ban the word “Me” from my husband’s vocabulary, because every time he says it, my son thinks of me, yours truly. So, I’ve been talking about myself in the third person for the last couple of weeks: “Do you want Mama or Daddy to change your diaper?” and “Let Mama carry the glass of water to the living room.”

In the last couple of days, Cavanaugh’s started to say, “mommommom.” I was sick this weekend and so he came into the room and said, “Mom up” as I had clearly been lying in bed for too long. Tonight he sat in Mike’s lap, chanting “Mom” into the straw he could have been using to drink fresh squeezed lemonade. He stood at the top of the stairs before bed and looked down at me as I climbed, then pointed and said, “Mom.”

Even though he still refers to me as “Me” sometimes, I am successfully renaming myself, but this time I’m doing it intentionally.

Teach This?: Vegetarianism

I’ve been a vegetarian since birth. I accidentally ate Vienna Sausages in kindergarten because I thought they were Veja Links (soy hot dogs that come in a can soaking in oil; my husband says they have the consistency of sand). I’ve tried chicken, turkey, crab, lobster, and shrimp on purpose. I’ve had accidental chicken and beef broth in soups, bacon bits and anchovies in salad, and beef fat in packaged donuts. Whether the ingestion was on purpose or accidental, just about every time I got very queasy or threw up. So, while I was pregnant, Mike and I spent a lot of time talking about whether or not our child-to-be would eat meat. Mike’s argument for giving Cavanaugh meat is that then he’ll have a choice. If he chooses to become a vegetarian later, then it will have been up to him. It won’t be because he’s lacking the digestive enzymes to process meat.

I agreed, in theory, but once Cavanaugh was born, the idea of feeding him meat made me recoil. Thinking about it actually makes me queasier than ingesting the dead animals myself. It feels like Cavanaugh would be tainted. I imagine this sounds quite extreme, but I did not cry when Cavanaugh had his first meat (in the form of dry cat food taken out of the bowl and chewed quite happily). Nor did I do anything more than cancel our order when the Taco Cabana drive thru worker confirmed that the beans from the kid’s burrito Mike has been feeding Cavanaugh when they’re out, and which he’d been told were vegetarian, do indeed have lard in them.

And yet, I just don’t know what to do about this meat thing. We don’t cook meat in the house (except on Thanksgiving). If Cavanaugh is going to eat it, I’d want it to be free range, hormone free, organic, and lacking antibiotics. Even then I just feel queasy. Whole Foods food court could feed them “healthy” chicken and it would still feel disgusting to me. Maybe fish? There have got to be healthy fish for kids to eat. Will the fish be the center of a snowball domino carnivorous slide and fall that will alienate me from my son’s gastronomic affection?

Any vegetarians out there want to let me know what you’ve chosen for your kids?

Teach This?: Fairy God Frog

Fairy God Frog

We haven’t decided yet if we’re going to perpetuate the tooth fairy myth — probably not, but that issue is years away considering Cavanaugh doesn’t have all of his baby teeth yet and we are still struggling to get him to let us brush his teeth. What’s made me think about it though is that my son recently found a stuffed frog doll that my husband has taken to calling Fairy God Frog. The frog has white satin wings, a blue shirt with white designed polka dots, green and white checkered pants, and a goofy smile, as you may be able to tell from its picture.

Early on, we read books that recommended getting Cavanaugh attached to a lovey (some item he could love on and carry around like Linus with his blanket). It’s never worked. We tried Bunrab, an organic cotton bunny head with a blanket for a body, and Tigger who I’d place between Cavanugh’s body and mine when he wanted to practice his pincer grasp. Maybe Cavanaugh didn’t need a lovey before or maybe I was his lovey as I was always around. Stuffed animals were usually something he moved to get to another toy, but not Fairy God Frog.

We were at Ikea when Cavanaugh spotted him a couple of weeks ago and he’s in love with this frog. When I kissed Cavanaugh after he woke up one morning, he held the frog up for me to kiss too. He wants to feed it his food, uses it to point at pictures while we’re reading books, and is especially thrilled when he holds the frog’s flipper hand to the doorknob to close the door. Cavanaugh even switches the frog from arm to arm when he’s nursing so he can hold the frog on the opposite side from his mouth on my breast. When we go somewhere in the car, the frog sits on Cavanaugh’s lap in the car seat. When we arrive where other kids will be, I ask Cavanaugh if he’ll share his frog or if he wants to leave it in the car to save for later. Most of the time, it stays in the car. When we carpooled with our friends last week, Cavanaugh traded the frog for a toy tractor. Ficle or generous? If we’d been reading a book about tractors, the frog would have been pointing to the baler and plow.

Watching Cavanaugh’s affection for this animal feels like a gift from a fairy god-something. It’s as fun to watch as Cavanaugh leaning in to pictures to kiss the cats, or bending to smell a flower (a real one or one on paper) then pointing to his nose to let me know that he was smelling. He is interacting with the world. He is finding what he loves irrespective of my gentle introductions to possible suitors. And he’s happy to jump his palm up and down to tell me that his new companion hops.

Teach This? Nosepicking

So, it’s not exactly nose-picking. We’ve been working on labeling body parts. While Cavanaugh lies in my lap, he points to my eyes, ears, etc and I say the name of whatever part he’s indicating. A couple of weeks ago, instead of just pointing to the end of my nose, he stuck his finger up my nostril, so I said, “Nostril.” He thought this was hilarious. Maybe it was my tone, my hey-the-baby’s-got-his-finger-up-my-nose tone, the one that says I don’t think I like this, I am trying not to react here because maybe it’ll all just blow over (no pun intended). But I gave the part a name, separated it from the general nose area and made it new. To add to the fun, he got a cold last week so there was all sorts of nose action, sneezing, snot, nose wipes. Now Cavanaugh’s finger is up my nostril and his nostril. Nostril, hilarious.

Teach This?: Me & My Shadow

For months, Cavanaugh has hardly been able to pass a mirror without leaning in to kiss himself. Tonight while I was trying to nurse him to sleep, he rolled over and saw his shadow on the wall. What ensued was a test of light, waving his arm to see if that mystery figure would wave back, pointing then laughing as another finger gestured toward the ceiling. Cavanaugh got on all fours, a scared cat slowly approaching the dark head and body on the wall as they gradually increased in size. He sat up and watched his buddy, waved, lay on his back to see what his shadow was doing.

Eventually I said, “You know your shadow needs some sleep.” Cavanaugh nodded. Of course it did. He won’t be needing an explanation of what shadows are from me.

Teach This: Drink

As we walked past the water fountain at the library today, Cavanaugh made the sign for “drink.” Okay, first of all, I didn’t even know that he knew what a water fountain was.

The library had conveniently placed a step stool next to the short fountain so Cavanaugh could stand on the top step and be at just the right height. I pressed the button for the water spout. Cavanaugh looked at the water. He reached into the water. He was still thirsty. So here’s the second of all, I’m now standing next to a machine I didn’t know he knew existed and now I’ve got to teach him how to use it.

I leaned over and drank some water. “See, just open your mouth and drink.”

I pushed the button again. Cavanaugh’s mouth was above the arc of water. I put my hands on his hips and leaned against his back softly. “Lean forward and open your mouth.”

I took my hand off his right hip and pressed the button then leaned my chest against his back again to ease his body towards the water.

His face hovered in the arc of water. He didn’t open his mouth.

I took my hand off the button and said, “You are using the water fountain. Now you get to drink.”

I pressed the button again. Cavanaugh leaned forward on his own, opened his mouth over the arc so that he caught the water passing by then let the water run against his closed mouth. This is how he drank from the fountain the next few times.

Later, at the park, he saw another fountain, made the sign for drink, contentedly sat on my hip as I carried him toward his new favorite toy. This time, he leaned towards the water as I pressed the button, he opened his mouth to catch a drink and let the arc flow through as he continued to sip and gulp, a professional water fountain drinker in less than ten tries.

Here’s the thing, I knew before I had him that it would be my job to teach him, to introduce him to the world, to help with so many things I knew then I couldn’t predict or fathom.

Let’s take drinking as our example. First, there was breastfeeding, the latch, staying awake long enough to sate his hunger, even burping. Second, we tried bottles. Let’s just say neither my husband nor I were successful at that. We weren’t used to teaching him yet. We didn’t do a good job. He didn’t really take bottles, so until he started eating solid food, I couldn’t be gone for longer than two hours or he would cry with hunger. Next were sippy cups. Boy, sippy cups. All of his buddies had mastered them and Cavanaugh just couldn’t figure it out. Why tilt them, what were the spouts for, what did he have to do to get the liquid out? Instead, he wanted to drink from our cups, our water bottles. And we have painstakingly, carefully taught him for months to just drink a little, to not pour the water over his face and down his front. He is an amazing drinker out of a grown up cup. Somewhere in the grown up cup lessons, he has been given enough sippy cups at playgroups, at restaurants when the ice was just too tempting to allow the glass to be drunk from rather than played with, in the car when we’re driving on a hot Texas afternoon, that he mastered the sippy cup as he was mastering a grown up glass. Straws still confound him. But today, he is a master’s level water fountain drinker. Who knew how many different ways and times one could teach a person to drink?

Parents. More experienced parents knew.

Teach This?: More

Cavanaugh has learned to sign “More.” We started signing to him when he was about eight months old, the age BabyCenter and our signing books said he could physically make some of the signs. We wanted him to know the signs for words that would help us give him what he wanted or needed: milk, up, eat, drink, book. He learned “milk” and “up” months ago, but the only other sign we’ve seen is “duck” which he picked up from our quacking motion as we sang “Five Little Ducks.” Besides that, he hasn’t done any other signs.

I kind of figured maybe he just wasn’t into it, that he’d started saying some words and maybe we’d give up the idea that sign language would help him communicate. I stopped teaching new signs and only sporadically remembered to use the signs we’d attempted to teach before, but his buddy Avalon came over with a hurt knee and knew the sign for “owie.” A couple of weeks before that she made the sign for “airplane.” All right, maybe he just hadn’t been ready before.

When we’d feed him dinner and he would reach towards our plates, I’d ask, “Do you want more macaroni?” and do the sign for “more,” the fingers on both hands in a closed quacking motion and tapping against each other. When Cavanaugh would grab Max’s Breakfast after we’d read it and hand it back so Mike would read it again, I’d say, “Do you want to read it more times? Do you want to read the book again?” while signing “more.” He got it.

“More” he signs for everything now, more food, more books, and anytime he likes something, he signs “more.” We went to visit a nursery and amongst the plants was a pond with a waterfall. We sat on the bench next to it and he signed “more” to say, “I like it.” “More” means I like it, I want it, do it again, do it over, keep doing it, can I have some? “More” means want, love, you know what I’m saying and so I’ll apply it to everything. It is such a pure reach for communication and every time we understand or respond when he says it, the more he signs “More.” You get it. Understand me more.

Teach This?: He Kissed Me!

I’ve been giving Cavanaugh Eskimo kisses since he was a newborn. Tonight in his delirious sleepydom, he was rolling around the bed, attempting somersaults in a delayed downward dog then giggling as he rolled onto his side, over the pillow, lounging on my body as if i were a chaise. He twisted himself up onto the pillows then leaned over my head from above and gave me an upside down Eskimo kiss. He initiated his first kiss, his head shaking no to rub my nose as he cooed like a pigeon.

Just like all of parenting, I lead, model, teach, kiss, and one day he knows how to do it on his own, imitates what we do and knows why he’s doing it. I feel like a teenage girl lingering under a porch light, my hand to my face to hold the kiss there. He kissed me.

Teach This? Dancing with Yoda

Cavanaugh’s pediatrician is a Star Wars fan, a big one. He’s got two Star Wars exam rooms, one dedicated to episodes 1 – 3 and one to episodes 4 – 6. My husband and I prefer the old school room because, well, we’re old enough to have seen the original episodes on the big screen. Either room though means vehicles hanging from the ceiling, posters on the walls, and today a life size cardboard cut out of Yoda, which is just about eye level for Cavanaugh.

To occupy him while we waited for the doctor, we placed the cut-out in front of Cavanaugh. He pointed to Yoda’s nose for awhile. We’re into naming body parts right now. Then he picked Yoda up by the arms and started a slow shuffle that would pass for a waltz on any prom dance floor, a happy twirl and side to side bobbing he’s only ever experienced on my hip as we dance around the living room to the local classical station.

Who knew the Force, which my husband so often says “is strong in this one” would make for a waltz with a Jedi? The date I imagined in his future, his first dance partner besides me or my husband, was not a little green being daring one to “Judge me by my size, will you?” Cavanaugh didn’t judge him at all, just reached for his arms and asked for this dance.