ME with Boy? Never!

I currently have so many files on my desk I have actually forgotten what color the desk is.  Nonetheless I’m going to write.  If you have to ask why I would do such a silly thing you’ve clearly never meet me.  So today I’m going to write about last weekend.  The weekend that was spent surrounded by children, involved very little sleep and made me contemplate scary things like a biological clock etc.  That, however, is not what I’m going to write about.  There are hours and hours of biological clock discussions to be had so I’m going to leave those for a later date.  No I am going to write about the shopping expedition to Toys R Us that proceeded the weekend of kids.  The trip where I had to put the boy on one of those kiddie leashes because you would honestly have thought he was an out of control 5 year old in the transformer section of the store.  The most interesting part of the trip for me though was the mini pink little princess baseball bat, ball included, that I saw hanging right next to the full size baseball bat.  I couldn’t help but notice it.  Did they have things like that when we were children?  Seriously did they?  I remember pink Barbie doll dresses, baby cabbage patch dolls, and definitely pink purses and makeup but I have no recollection of any mini or pink sports paraphernalia.  As far as I can recall if you were a girl who wanted to play baseball you had to play with the regular sized ugly brown baseball bat.  Same with soccer, or basketball or anything else.  No pink involved.  My first glimpse of the pink little princess baseball bat initially raised all my feminist alarm bells.  Pink almost never leads to anything good, especially when it is seen in children’s items.  It genearlly equates to brainwashing as far as I’m concerned.  The more I thought about it though the more I sort of liked the idea.  I think in my kid days (and yes I know this makes me sound ancient) and certainly in my mom’s kid days there were two options for girls.  One could choose to either be a girlie girl and play with Barbies etc. or  a ”tom boy”.  The feminist movement had succeeded enough to allow ”tom boys” to be acceptable even somewhat encouraged by a few hippie mothers.  But there was a definite choice.  You either had short hair and ran around in jeans or you wore frilly skirts and looked cute playing Barbies.  Those of us who sort of wanted to do both didn’t have much encouragement and we certainly didn’t have pink baseball bats to push us along.  While I would hardly be so naive as to suggest that the choice no longer exists it does seem to have diminished some.  Now it seems like one can be a girlie girl and still fall in the mud while playing sports.  Now the toy industry makes pink baseball bats with princesses on them.  Now, it seems, little girls are able to dream of dancing around in ball gowns with their knight in shinning armor as they crush little boys with their cute pink baseball bats.  Yeah Feminism!!!