Make your own ball!

Years and years ago—I can't find the post—I wrote about how Rachel once found a ball in the diaper bag in the middle of sacrament meeting, yelled, "BALL!" at the top of her lungs, and chucked that sucker across the chapel. It was a learning moment for me as a mother: make sure there are no balls in the diaper bag when going to meetings that are intended to be quiet and reverent.

Check. Lesson learned. Got it. Thanks.

(But let's take a moment to appreciate a new word! My baby can talk! (I'm pretty sure that was in the post, too)).

Now, it's been said that raising boys is different from raising girls, that they're intrinsically different from each other. I don't disagree with this entirely, although I always point out that my girls are polar opposites so I've found that raising girls is different from raising girls. Still, boys have their fun little boyish traits that just pop out every now and then.


Yesterday we arrived early enough to enjoy the prelude music—a string sextet. While I was answering all of Rachel and Miriam's questions about which one was the cello and why Brother Rogerson wasn't standing with the "rest" of the violins (hint: he plays the viola) and why no one was playing the bass and what song this was so they could read along in the hymnal while the musicians played...I was mostly ignoring Benjamin, which should have been fine because Andrew was right there.

But then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something fly across the room.

I turned my head to watch a wad of paper soar down the aisle, then scanned back to find the perpetrator, and there was my little boy, proudly announcing to bystanders, "Me make a ball!"

He'd wadded up a program that he'd taken from the table by the front door and had lobbed it across the chapel.

Nudging Andrew with my elbow, I said. "He made a ball."

Andrew jumped up and dealt with the problem and no more balls were thrown during sacrament meeting yesterday, at least to my knowledge.

I'm still not convinced this was a boy thing, necessarily. If our third child had been a girl with Rachel's personality she probably would have wadded up paper to make a ball, too—because that activity was just begging to be done, wasn't it? And having not had the experience of bringing a ball to church (because I'd already learned to make sure those get left at home) Benjamin didn't "know" any better (though, I mean, really...if he'd stopped to think about it he probably could have figured it out...but two-year-olds aren't really known for that, are they?).

Anyway, if I were one to believe that boys are "just" different from girls (which I'm not because other than potty training (which has, truthfully, been a completely different adventure with Benjamin than it was with the girls) Benjamin has always fallen about in the middle of Miriam and Rachel on the personality spectrum, with one being super wound up all the time and the other being calm and quiet most of the time) this would be one of the times I would proclaim that raising boys is different from raising girls.