Oh man. Jake’s going to be 7 in a couple days. And then Noah turns 4. What happened? It seems like we were just sending baby announcements, and now they’re getting to be…big. Well, actually, we really were just sending announcements, but that was a different baby. You know what I mean.

In the last couple of weeks we’ve been watching the old, original GI Joe cartoons from the 80s. And I’ve been reading the old comic books which were actually pretty good. I even dug out my old action figured that spent twentysomething years in Grandma’s closet and my boys have been keeping the world safe from Cobra ever since.

I remember one time when Jake was an infant, we were walking through a Toys r Us. I was just pushing the stroller around, killing time. As I went past the action figured, there was a guy there looking at Spider-Man figures or something like that. He had a little pink bundled baby asleep in a stroller. As I passed and gave the nod, he groaned.

“Oh man,” he said quietly but with genuine angst, “I wish I had a boy.”

I felt a little sorry for him. Not because he wasn’t going to buy a bunch of toys for his kid and then play with them himself, but because he was setting himself to miss out on all the fun and learning you can have raising a little girl. Now, contrary to what both my wife and her brother say, Barbie sucks. But there are plenty of little girl toys that don’t suck. Don’t let all the pink fool you, there’s a lot of fun and creativity in the “girl” aisle. Hey, some girls even like transformers! And my little girl is probably going to like GI Joe figures. At least a little.

And she’ll tolerate Barbies because she knows her mother loves them and her uncle has a borderline unhealthy fascination with them, but we all know the truth about Barbies.

But I digress. The freaky things is that Jake is getting big. He’s almost as tall as my mother – which for those of you who know her is not saying much, but still…it’s a milestone when you surpass your Grandma’s height, isn’t it? As he grows, though, I find that he enjoys the same kinds of things I always enjoyed and Noah, though a few years younger, is keeping up.

So I am cutting that Toys r Us dude some slack. Yeah, I think he was missing the boat a little by regretting the  gender of his first born in the toy aisle, but I kind of appreciate his point. It really is pretty cool to lay down on the bedroom carpet with a couple of action figures and create stories that inevitably result in all the bad guys turning into good guys so they can all go to a big party together. Nations of the world are you listening?