Gender Specific

Okay, so Olivia has reached that age where she's very much aware that she's a girl. She's also very much aware that Jaxon is a boy.

And she's all about being as girly as possible.

Alyssa was very much like this at four.

Like Alyssa before her, Olivia is all about princesses and pink and castles and frills.

Where Alyssa has outgrown her fondness of pink (her current favorite color is robin's egg blue) Olivia is still right in the middle of her girliness.

When she's at my mom's and runs out of her pink princess Pull Ups (which might be on their way out, but I didn't actually say that, so shhhhhhh...) and my mom tries to put one of Jaxon's blue Toy Story Pulls Ups on her she loses her little mind.

She feels like she's being punished by being made to wear boy underwear. It's a genious way to get her to use the potty. All credit goes to Gram.

If Olivia thinks that anything at all has a boy tilt to it, she doesn't want anything to do with it. If she knew the phrase, she'd declare that boys have cooties.

While I love that she's at this developmental stage and that she's got such a clear sense of herself, it can be very, very frustrating.

Just this afternoon I took her a cup of water. We still used sippy cups around here because, as mature as O is about understanding her gender and giving inanimate objects gender specificity, she will also stand three feet from me and dump an open cup of water onto the floor just because she can.

So sippy cups it is. And when I tried to give her a cup with Prince Edward (from which cartoon? Unsure but his princess counterpart is Giselle.) on the cap she refused to even touch the cup. She decided she wasn't thirsty.

I asked if that was because of the lid and she nodded. I changed the lid to Cinderella and she drained the water.

So...annoyingly specific about what she'll play with, use as eating/drinking utensils but age appropriate? Yes to all and for that, I'm thankful, even for the annoying parts because hey, part of being four years old is being annoying for the sake of being annoying.

And part of parenting a four year old is taking the annoying with the rest. I'm okay with that.