Alternate title (thanks to my friend Stacy):  I Didn’t Know the Feminist in me was Supposed to Hate Them

My nine year old niece LOVES LEGO’s.  When she comes over here to my house, it’s almost always the first thing she plays with.  Having boys who are also in love with LEGO’s we have LOTS of them with their own dedicated station.  There is always lots of house and family building.  We have many sets that are usually only built “correctly” once, and then just tossed into the community bucket for many more hours of imaginative creating.

It’s all good. Right?

My nieces are also VERY girly.  They like pink, they like dolls, they like to get pedicures with grandma.  This does not make them any less smart than the other girl who would rather play space explorer (and FYI: these girls like to play in the dirt more than my own boys).

So when Christmas came around and I was shopping for my niece, I actually went looking for girly themed LEGO’s.  I was sorely disappointed that there was NONE.  A few Hello Kittie Megablocks, but she already had all of those.  And I remember thinking in the Toys R Us, “Why don’t they make girly LEGO kits?”

Really. I did.

Then, right after Christmas, LEGO announced a new “girly” LEGO Friends line of products and I was PISSED!  But not pissed at them for being pink and girly, I was pissed that they didn’t come out before Christmas because my nieces would LOVE LOVE LOVE them!  I thought they had terrible timing for I would have purchased the cute little pink beauty shop in a heartbeat had they been available.  I decided I would just have to purchase them for the girls at their next birthdays and that was that.

Then, today, like every other day, I was chatting with Cheryl (the mother of two girls) and she said:

She then linked up this blog post:  Letter From 14yo Girl to LEGO and I found something that Jessica Gottleib said that also told me that I must be living in the dark ages.  How backwards am I that I think these LEGO sets are cute?  I must be contributing to the devaluing of girls everywhere.  Perhaps because I live in a house of all boys I am out of touch with the feminist movement?

OR, what is so bad about letting girls be “girly?”  Why can’t the female CEO of some major company like pink and getting pedicures at the spa?  Hell, my youngest son likes pink, does that mean he won’t be able to play football some day?  I think not.

Why can’t we just let kids like what they like?  What is up with all the weird gender stuff lately?  People not telling the world what gender their kids are and going extreme with what toys are proper?  My boys have dolls.  My nieces have RC trucks.  It’s all OKAY.

My nieces are beautiful little girls who love purple and prance around in princess slippers.  They are also tough as nails and generally out-do my boys in traditional “boy” roles.  So I still plan on buying these pretty little LEGO Friends sets for my nieces because they are super cute and the girls will love them.  They will build the flower garden, care for the pets and then probably take the house outside to the mud hole and destroy it playing construction worker.