Across Sticks and a Well-thumbed Passport

This pic is cute, but try this one, it's definitively bad ass by any definition.

We're not the type of people who want to push anything on lil' Zed but there will surely be some things that she either does or doesn't come by naturally, like picking up a lacrosse stick. Here's a quick glance at what she's already doing that we've never pushed on her but that doesn't surprise us.

- playing with her "across" stick...
- doing front flips and tucks all by herself...
- getting excited to go to the ballpark...
- blossoming in the busiest of places...
- traveling well...
- preferring to eat sushi or just plain rice whenever given the option...
- reading like it was her job...
- getting frustrated easily but letting it go just as quickly...
- a curiosity about how things work...
- a quick comfort in social situations...
- she #$%&ing hates Ohio State...
- super sensitive...
- swimming in the bathtub...
- watching Sesame Street and the Muppets (okay, we kind of thrust that at her)...
- an affinity for The Beach Boys...
- she could walk everywhere and all the time...
- she gets terribly crotchety when she's tired...
- she does nine things at once...

There's surely more, but we won't bore the entire interweb with our daughters startlingly familiar characteristics. All I can say is that we don't force a thing on her. We influence her tenfold with our likes, loves, and our obvious aversions, like the SEC Conference and Nickleback, only because she's an awfully observant kid, but we don't go out of our way to influence her otherwise, or at least, we try not to.

Yeah, yeah...sure she's got a Pearl Jam tee, and sure she has a Tigers jersey, and a Michigan hat and sweatshirt, and yeah, she's got every Oliver Jeffers book ever written, but placing those things into her life is the smallest of influential crimes, at least in the context of today's whackjob parent. I think that those things that we might impact her cognitive development with are a minor threat in terms of creating the monster that some parents might manage to construct. It's not like if she chooses not to listen to the Grateful Dead that we're going to disown her...I just won't be paying for college, that's all...and, of course, she'll have absolutely no excuse on that first occasion that she tries drugs.

Disclaimer: We hope that she doesn't try drugs.

Super obvious second disclaimer: We know that she's going to try drugs.