To be a cool dude

When Theo feels a little under the weather he loses all ability to play by himself. Usually he will go off with the legos and only come up for air when he has to eat or go to the bathroom. But Sunday he was suffering from a headache and followed Jon and I around the house begging for us to play legos with him. Jon did a great job of complying while Eli and I were out for a ski. When we got home, it was clearly my turn. I suffer when we are just free-lancing with the legos. I love putting together a new set with directions, but when faced with 7,653 legos and no plan, I get stymied. So I sat down in the office with Theo with a bit of a bad attitude. But then he started chatting about school, and it turned into one of the sweeter hours I've spent with him lately. His kindergarten class has reading buddies from a 5/6 grade class. Theo started telling me that his buddy wasn't "really.....a ..chick...No, he's not a dude. He doesn't have like cool dude hair or anything. Cole's buddy, now he has some cool dude hair! But my buddy is a good reader, and really that is what matters most. Right??" It was fascinating to watch Theo try to put into words his impression of his buddy, and to note that he is already perceiving this difference between 'dudes' and 'not-dudes'. Today, while I was at Expo, I was telling his teacher about this little convo. She took me over to look at the pictures of Theo and all his classmates with their reading buddies. And by looking at the pictures, I think I agree with Theo. And then Mary looked at Theo's buddy, and she said, "Yep, his teacher says that he picks his nose a lot..." So, it looks like it's time that I start paying more attention to my own hair styling techniques. I can't have Theo labeling me a 'not-dude' or a 'not-chick' as the case may be. And for the record, I did, after one hour of hard labor, make a pretty cool lego screen porch for one of the 27 buildings Jon had constructed earlier in the day.