As I have posted before, my daughter is three. She loves knives and has four of her own.
http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/showthread.php/912211-2012-EDC-selection-with-my-daughter
It's interesting. She is very, very respectful of knives. (I don't own but a BB gun, so that hasn't been an issue yet) She has several times brought me a knife she found lying around. She listens and learns very well. She loves fishing and motorcycles, too. Fishing especially. We go all the time. She hasn't caught a fish completely on her own yet, but she can cast better than most men I see (no joke). She also likes tea parties and disney princesses and dancing. She doesn't seem to make a distinction between gender specific activities. I cook sometimes. My wife uses a knife pretty well.
She definitely likes the things we like. And models her behavior off ours. My wife was a dancer and she is a dancing fool. Two neat stories which I've probably told before. When she was two, for her birthday I gave her one of those wooden kit knives. She unwrapped it and immediately started 'shaving' arm hair. No one knew what she was doing except me and my wife and we couldn't stop laughing.
She has a Kawasaki tricycle and she frequently asks me to help her work on it. We wrench on it and act real serious. A few weeks ago she started talking about how it had a dead bee in it. Finally, she takes my flashlight and makes a vacuum noise over the fork. Bam. I remembered, she was 'helping' months and months earlier when my bro in law and I changed the spark plug on my KLR. There was a dead bee in there (and about a million pebbles). We barely even said anything about it. I never would have remembered.
And yeah, I was a pyro. I think I started smoking just cause I needed something to do with the lighters and matches we always had. This was when I lived in Southern VA and we'd cut lengths of hollow reeds and smoke them, too. We had bb gun wars and I can't believe we didn't burn one of our houses down. As I have often said, I am amazed any boys grow to be men.
My wife is pregnant and I'm pretty sure it's gonna be a boy. Heaven help us. The dumb shit I did. Scares me, to be honest. My wife asks me to explain the difference and I always tell her that boys play games designed for no other purpose than hurting each other. That about says it all. You don't see little girls sitting and trading punches for no reason.
