Happy families

Mabel is something of a girly girl, with her pink and her tutus and her babies, but she still likes to stick it to the patriarchy.

Ever since she was first talking - and she talked early and often - she has insisted that her toys are almost always "she"s. I'd take a small plastic kangaroo, or a plush puppy, or whatever the item of the moment was, out of her hands to help her out of her carseat and say "Here, give him to me," and she'd always answer, exasperated, "It's a her!"

Some children mix their pronouns until quite late on, but Mabel was always quite certain that most of her toys were of the female persuasion. It's a convention of our language to use the masculine as a neutral, so I might ask her "What's he doing?" about a clearly genderless rubber frog, perhaps. But Mabel didn't get that particular lingustic memo, and as far as she's concerned, everything defaults to female. More power to her, I say.

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She always plays families with whatever is to hand: given one large and one small dinosaur, one is instantly the mommy and one the little girl. Given four, there will also be a daddy and a brother, or maybe two mommies and a little sister. (If one is actually a pony, that's okay: it was adopted.) A box of crayons is just as likely to be sorted into a bunch of rainbow relatives as to be used for their given purpose. Wrenches, nails, pebbles, leaves, french fries: they've all been turned into family members by my daughter.

The extended crayon family

Dash has a half-size skateboard that we found at the thrift store a while ago. Last week I caught Mabel running across the road with it to reunite it with its mommy, the full-size skateboard at our neighbours' house.

Right now she's outside putting together a family of scooters belonging to all the kids on the street. 

At IKEA, reuniting all the mommies and babies

I promise you she hasn't experienced any deeply sublimated family-separation trauma in her young life - but you'd be forgiven for thinking that she had.