His Favorite Girl

I've spent enough time around kids, mine and other people's, to notice that when it comes to how they feel about the opposite sex, age has nothing to do with it.  Nor does the sex of the child.  They are either all about it or they find it embarrassing or even disgusting.

My boys fall somewhere between embarrassing and disgusting.  It's not that they don't like girls.  Far from it.  Some of Ben and Mitchell's closest friends are girls.  But if anyone even hints at the word "girlfriend," or raises an eyebrow when a girl gets flirty with them, or teases them in any way about girls, they get embarrassed and shush you.  Big time shushing.  And add in some serious eye-rolling too.  You get the picture. Ben more so than Mitchell, probably because Mitchell is just better at ignoring anything he doesn't like.  

But because they have been good-naturedly teased about it and just exposed to the whole idea that a friendship between a girl and a boy might someday have more involved that they don't quite get, they now use that knowledge as just one more thing to torment each other with.  

When they tire of more tried and true forms of pestering that start to loose their irritating effectiveness, they now toss in girlfriend comments.  Any time one of them wants to bug the other, they just claim some girl is his girlfriend and off they go!  

Jack doesn't get what all the fuss is about.  He is just recently even aware that girls are not just boys wearing girlish pink!  But because he listens to everything going on around him and soaks up all his brothers do like a sponge, he's jumping on the girlfriend wagon as well.  But he's all about it!

Riding in the car a couple days ago, he was playing with his phone.   Normally, he is playing a game on it, but this time, he was pretending to talk on it.  He was chatting away and I asked him who he was talking to and he said, "Oh, just my girlfriend."  I asked who his girlfriend was and he said, "Oh mom, it's you of course!  I'm talking to you because you are my girlfriend!  You are my favorite girl so you're my girlfriend."

He might be the sweetest boyfriend I've ever had.  I'll overlook his age and general lack of personal hygiene.  I'll be his girlfriend until he decides to break up with me.