Kathryn starts first grade today. That means only 1,095 days until the twins start pre-K, but who's counting?
There are 16 boys in Kathryn's class and she is 1 of only 5 girls. Until this summer, I wasn't the kind of dad to fret about the boy-to-girl ratio, but something happened last month that changed my mind: Kathryn's birthday party. We had invited everyone from Kathryn's old kindergarten class but, due to summer trips and other intangibles, only one other girl came. The rest were boys--twelve to be exact. And that is when I learned something very important: 6-year-old boys have no brain.
None whatsoever. Their behavior is not tempered to even the slightest degree by reason. At best, they have some sort of rudimentary nerve cluster inside their heads, the same kind of pea-sized organ that I remember trying in vain to find in my messily-dissected high school biology frog. This nerve cluster dates back to when our ancestors first crawled from the sea and saw a world full of things to eat, destroy, or both. It is responsible for two impulses, Fight and Flight, and, best as I can tell, today's young men often engage in both simultaneously.
These boys turned my daughter's birthday party into a 6-year-old version of When Animals Attack. They ran around in a mindless pack, grabbing everything in reach, fighting over it, breaking it, dropping it, then running in to a new location. Then the faster boys would grab new, shiny things to destroy, while the slower ones trailed behind, picking up discarded bits from the trail of broken things then dropping them again as the herd moved on once more.
So it is with great trepidation that I watch my daughter, looking so very small, march in to school with her new, evolutionarily-challenged classmates. Maybe first grade will help instill a brain in these boys, but I doubt it. Anyway, at least there's one good part: my daughter is too young to think any of them are cute. Yet.
