Sunday, March 20, 2011

Noah the Hunter

For those of you who even REMOTELY are considering that you can avoid gender stereotypes and raise your child gender neutral, read this.

1.  You are an idiot and sorely mislead by reading ultra feminist rants by people who more than likely never had children in the first place.
2.  You CANNOT take out of a person what we are naturally designed to be like.

We sort of held this notion that we would let Noah be whomever he wanted to be.  We wanted it to be okay if he wanted to play with dolls.  We did dress him in traditional clothing and we fulfill traditional husband and wife stereotypes but we wanted him to see that anyone can be who they want to be.

When Noah's first word was "truck" and he had an obsession with trucks despite the fact that we are not big car people or really into our vehicles, I knew that all of the things I had read about gender stereotypes to be largely false or at least misguided to a degree.

We also did not want to raise our son around guns.  We (meaning I) have lots of family members who hunt and have guns and I grew up with guns in our home.  But, as I was pregnant with him when 9-11 occurred and we had entered a war we did not support, guns were not something we wanted modeled for him.

Fast forward 9 years.....we have a war obsessed gun lover who I would allow to go and hunt but to be honest, I don't think he has the heart or the stomach for it.  And, as I am not particularly fond of meat  and am really not fond of game, we are putting off the hunting lessons.  So, for now, he is content with shooting at cans with his grandparent's BB gun and saving his money to buy his own.

Here are a few photos from Pop!