Sugar and Spice

I have always been drawn to vintage artwork that depicts children.  Images of little girls playing tea party are particularly endearing to me.  Having been blessed with only boys to raise, I didn’t see this sort of scene very often in our truck-and-dinosaur-littered house (or I should say I NEVER saw it):

A few weeks ago, the daughters-in-law who are married to sons #3 and #4 were over at our house for a play date with their eight children, five of them girls.  And all of a sudden I looked over and caught the two youngest lasses in the bunch, 18-month-old cousins whose birthdays are only two weeks apart, doing this:

I promise you, no one set them up like this for a photo-op.  They just decided all on their own to sit across from each other at the picnic table in our basement playroom, each holding a little plastic tea cup and pretending to take sips. Aren’t they just the cutest?! What sweet little ladies. 😍😍

My husband and I have lots of sugar and spice and everything nice in our lives these days, with nine of our 17 grandchildren being girls.  Our playroom is stockpiled with toys favored by boys, many of them saved from when their daddies were little fellas; but we also have plenty of girly stuff now, too, like tea sets, a play kitchen stocked with play food, doll houses, and multiple baby dolls—the kinds of toys which we didn’t have in our “testosterhome” (to steal Rachel Balducci’s term, the title of her blog back in the day) before we became grandparents.

I can't think of anything cuter than seeing a
baby girl playing mommy to a baby doll.  

I never minded being surrounded by snakes and snails and puppy dog tails, not one bit; in fact, I took such delight in raising my boys.

But I also must admit that the infusion of sugar and spice into our lives is a pretty sweet development.