Having a girl

Olivia has changed so much in the last few weeks, with all her new party tricks in her bag and her personality really taking shape. Yesterday there was the whole pretending to talk on the phone thing that I remember each of the kids doing. There is something painfully cute about a baby holding random objects up to their ears and beaming while they say "HEDDDOOOO!" Today, however, she proved there are definite innate differences between boys and girls. Ever since the boys were her age, they have pushed cars and trains around, built things with blocks, and loved to play with balls. They declined pretty much all stuffed animals, dolls, dollhouses, etc. This morning when they emptied the plush toys bin, they rediscovered the baby dolls I gave them when Olivia was born. I had these great ideas that they would love their babies and want to copy everything I did for Olivia on their own little babies. They played with them for about five seconds, and Sam would occasionally put a baby to his boob and pretend to breastfeed, or slam a baby into the crib saying it needed a nite-nite, but they never really got into the whole baby doll/nurturing thing. The dolls were, however, covered in marker because apparently the only use the boys found for them was as a canvas. Olivia quickly beelined to the dolls with her stealth military crawl, and took them over. She smiled at them and talked to them and held them close to her. She slobbed all over them, causing the washable marker on them to smear all over her own face and make them look very close to triplets. She screamed with horror if the boys tried to take one of them from her, and she spent quite some time just turning them around and talking into their baby faces. I thought it was a fluke, but when she awoke from her nap this afternoon, she again found her way right back to the baby dolls and spent even more time playing with them and declaring them her own. And I couldn't help but think to myself how glad I am to have my own sweet baby girl, so different from the boys and rough play to which I have grown accustomed. So many things to look forward to...