My own social experiment

You know how you have more than one child so they can play with each other while you blog or talk on the phone? Sometimes that backfires and they fight more than play and you get very angry because that makes it hard to talk on the phone. But usually it works out. Well, here at our house I had a very special time of day where Ethan would go to his little neighborhood preschool and Noelle would nap. And it happened at the SAME TIME. This hour and a half was known as bliss. However, Noelle no longer naps in the morning and this hour has turned into not-so-much-bliss. I try to get lots accomplished and she tries hard to make sure I don't. So today I changed my focus and let her help me with my experiment of the social sciences.

It began with this bag of shoes:

We are the recipients of lots of castoffs from generous family and friends. Thus we have this bag of shoes that would enable Noelle to wear a different pair everyday. Notice how they are definitely girl shoes. Noelle loves to get in the bag and pull the shoes out. But when I tell her to bring some shoes to wear when we are actually going somewhere she brings me these: Noelle did her own hair so don't judge, OK?

These are obviously sandals from her older brothers. This led me to conduct my own social experiment to decide if she would choose male oriented things over female oriented things. I am very qualified to conduct such an experiment because I took a few sociology classes in college to boost my GPA.

Test #1: Babies versus T-Rex.

Results:

Hands down T-Rex won. But because I have a scientific mind I realized this result might be somewhat misleading. She may only have preferred the T-Rex because it is Mitch's and he keeps it on his bed and he closes the door so she never gets to play with it (unless Mitch isn't home and I pull it out so she can play with it like the naughty mom I sometimes am) So I moved on to Test #2:

Pushing a dump truck or a baby stroller.

Results:

Yes, ten minutes later Noelle had still not touched either toy. She was too busy doing this:Climbing up and down the same chair was apparently more appealing than having my test completed. I know lots about conducting research and you are not supposed to coerce your subjects into participating. So that was the end of it. I guess I will never be published in one of those research magazines that nobody reads except the people who are actually published in them.

My personal feelings on the matter are that Noelle is a definite girl surrounded by lots of boy things and boy behaviors. If she is lucky she will turn out like me (who had a very hard childhood with seven older brothers who tried very hard to corrupt me) and be the perfect combination of all good things male and female. And I will have you know I was able to type up this very long social experiment because Mitch and Ethan are both home now and entertaining Noelle for me. How do parents of a single child get anything done?