boys and trucks

What is UP with the gender-specific desires for toys? Clark has out of the blue fallen in love with trucks. And construction vehicles. And tractors. When Frances was little we had some truck books and she never showed even a second of patience for or interest in them. These same books are still floating around our house and Clark has recently discovered them. HOW can his fascination be something simply ingrained? And what did cave boys obsess about? It all completely confounds me.

Recently the county did a bunch of construction on our sewer pipes and for weeks there were bulldozers and dump trucks and fellas in hardhats on our street: breaking up concrete, digging, moving loads of dirt, making lots of noise. Oh the joy. All I had to do was put small people in the wagon and take them out to the road. I'd pull the wagon into the shade under a tree and sit on the sidewalk beside them. We could pass all kinds of time this way.

Meanwhile, it's summer here; a different summer than I'm used to, but summer nonetheless. All Frances wants to do is wear her bathing suit because it shows her belly button, and all Clark wants to do it play in the sandbox. Both are problematic. For the former, it's often only 65 degrees, and for the latter, he gets sand in his hair and in his ears and in his mouth and down his diaper, and he's gritty and uncomfortable until he has a bath. Plus, his poop has been strange and grainy lately, and I only yesterday realized it's all the sand he's eating. You know how it's hard to wipe sand off your body when it's wet? Yeah, like that.