planes, trains and automobiles

I've never pushed gender specific toys in my house. I was a little girl who loved making mud piles with my Tonka trucks in dirt, but I also had a love affair with Barbie (still do). Adelaide seems to be joining the princess ranks without any help from us. She really loves dolls, her Barbies, dress-up, and anything pretty. Just this morning she admired herself in the mirror in her favorite pink dress for school and said to me "Mommy, when I wear my dress, I look like this (smiling in the mirror) and I think I look pretty." (LORD help us-she's not even 4). I of course explained to her that she's beautiful inside and out no matter what she's wearing; it's her heart that matters. She ran to pick out her fancy dress shoes and socks to match.

Arabella is a very different child with varying interests. She's still very young of course. On one hand she loves playing with her big sister (it's all about Addie); pushing doll strollers and rocking her baby dolls in her arms. She has also inherited a love for shoes from her mother and most of the time walks around in her panties and a pair of cool shoes. Nothing else. She is in love with Barney, Elmo and right now the big thing is Ernie from Sesame Street (Aunt Meg's favorite). Her real love is airplanes but she'll take trains or school buses too. We have a wooden train set that we got for Christmas which is probably my favorite toys to get out and build little cities with. Addie and I will build homes out of Duplos for her PlayMobil princesses that live next to the tracks. I love building bridges on the risers and letting the little trains stop to offload their cargo. Don't get me started about that little piece of track that twirls so the trains can change directions. I'm a total nerd about the train set.Yesterday Arabella's attention span reach great new lengths. We sat together for at least an hour playing with the train set. I've given up on the elaborate train tracks with overpasses and bridges and cargo stations for her. All she wants is a ramp so the trains can go up and down and a half circle of track. She's a bit of a bulldozer so I'm still reassembling the ramp and risers fifty trillion times in an hour. Towards the end of our hour she discovered that she can put the track together like a puzzle. She proceeded to build her own track until all the pieces were gone and I just undid what she had done to give her a new length of track to place at her end. She was in heaven.I love watching my daughters develop their own set of preferences. I love Addie's passionate stance on being a Mommy as what she wants to be when she grows up. And from the looks of how she bounces her baby doll on her hip she's going to be a pretty darn good one. I love that Bella can choose to love completely different things if she wants. Fighter pilot seems like a good future career path for this little girl right now. As long as the uniform is panties and shoes.