Watching: The West Wing and Law & Order, two smart, well-written programs.

Feeling: Much better than yesterday! I guess my low mood was due partly to the weather, partly to the time of the month.

Boys as Dogs

"Think of boys as big dogs. You've got to run them several times a day."

Sage words from a woman of our acquaintance, a mother of older boys. We have attempted to follow her advice; most days we take the boys on several long walks or spend an hour at a playground to give them the chance to run around and play.

I don't like to make distinctions between children based on gender. I was a teenager of the 1970s, and I absorbed much of that decade's zeitgeist. I proudly consider myself a feminist, and I entered parenthood with the full intention of raising my children in a gender-blind manner. All my kids, whether boys or girls, would have stuffed animals and dolls as well as cars and trucks to play with. None of them would be allowed toy guns or other instruments of destruction.

Imagine my surprise when the boys started pretending the dolls were guns and the Beanie Babies were hand grenades.

Friends of mine who have both sons and daughters say there is a difference between them: that their boys tend to be more physically active while the girls have longer attention spans and focus their energies on interpersonal relationships. I look at my own impulsive, rambunctious sons, and I think of my sisters and myself at that age. Night and day.

Whenever my sisters and I entered a new environment, say, a doctor's office, we would sit quietly and size up our location visually. In contrast, when we were at the pediatricians yesterday, the twins dashed all over the room, opening and closing doors, opening and closing drawers, and climbing up and down off the examining table.

My boys also react to conflict in very physical ways. When my sisters and I had arguments, we might have ended up screaming at each other, while the boys' disagreements may start off verbally but usually end up in a Three Stooges-style poke-fest or in a wrestling match on the floor.

It makes me exhausted just watching them, sometimes. "Don't touch that, don't open that, stop doing that," is my constant refrain.

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