Yes, I'm Your "1900 Girl"

Apparently I've become the poster girl for a century, at least in my four year old's mind.

She's become fascinated lately with birth years; you can see her mind waking up to the concept not just of daily time, but historical time. And it's dawned on her that her birth year, 2002, sounds and looks different than Mommy and Daddy's birth years, which begin with 19.

I remember Dana and I used to talk about this late at night when I was pregnant with the sweet girl. We'd exclaim things like "she'll never live a day in the 20th century! She'll never write a date in the nineteen hundreds except when she's writing history essays!" But talking about it in the abstract is one thing; seeing it play out in front of you as your little one grows is quite different. I guess every parent reaches a point where they realize, with amazement, how much of what they remember and know is well before their child's historical memory, but somehow that seems more acute when your child's birth straddles a new century and (in this case) a new millennium.

Anyway, we've been chuckling together a lot the past few days as S. continues to explore the whole concept of these two very different sounding centuries. At the same time, she's also very into affirming gender ("Mommy, I'm so glad we're both girls!") so she's taken to calling herself either the "2002 girl" or sometimes just the "2000 girl." And she's taken to calling me the "1900 girl."

Which makes me feel like I should be wearing a corset and shirt-waist or perhaps practicing the Charleston....

Happy Mother's Day to all you "1900 Moms" out there!