NERDETTES

Thursday, October 23, 2008

We are raising girl nerds. Nerdettes? Nerdlets? Hm.

We have an 11 year old who is not into texting, school dances, makeup, incessant phone calls, tube tops, or computer games. She has an iPod she never uses. Instead she makes lanyard bracelets and watches Olympic skaters on YouTube.

We have a 6 year old who isn't into dolls, play dates, My Little Pony, or tea party. OK she will do any physical activity on earth - scooter, skates, gymnastics, running, throw herself off the couch, whatever. But actually she would rather look through our toy microscope at different dead things from the yard, and read the encyclopedia.

I invented this system called TV tickets. It bugged me that they were watching what I thought was too much TV - so now they each get TV tickets - they can spend them all watching a movie or they can spread them out during the week for a TV show here and there -and when they're out of tickets, they have to wait till Sunday to get more. Once the kids watched "The Sound of Music" and it's so bloody long they used all their tickets- and then no more TV that week.

First of all - they spent all their tickets watching a Julie Andrews musical - NERDY.

Second of all - the TV ticket thing sucked the impulsive fun right out of the activity, and made them all but forget about the television. They don't even really ask for it anymore.

So now I have effectively removed these kids from pop culture. TV, phone, iPod, Internet - either severely limited or not interesting to them. AND we live in suburban San Diego - where there is such cultural uniformity I can't even use haircuts to tell the moms apart. I feel like we are just candlemaking away from being Amish or something.

I worry that they are going to be out of touch. And yet - I like the nerdettes. They are learning about the world - the actual world, not Hannah Montana's world. The world that has hot lava in the middle and frozen ponds for ice skating on the top. I have no idea whether I'm doing the right thing or not. We'll know in 20 years.