I read some advice from Kristen about gender specific toys that got me thinking about how I want my son to see things differently than the way I was raised.  I'm from the South so I grew up in a family that, for the most part, viewed cooking, cleaning, and tending to the children as "woman's work" and labor-intensive jobs like construction, police work, etc. as "man's work."  Ironically, my younger sister joined the Army straight out of high school.  My mom did work outside the home for most of my growing up years and still does now.  But, even though she held a full-time job, as did my step-dad, the responsibilities for housework, gardening (we pretty much grew all the vegetables we ate), taking care of myself, my brother & my sister fell on her.  As we grew up, we got assigned chores.  My brother rarely folded laundry and I didn't learn to mow the yard until he moved out for college.  My mom made a concerted effort to teach my sister & I to cook (read: she forced me to learn, but I'm thankful for it now).  The highest praise I can remember, in fact, the only praise I can remember from my step-dad, was that I would "make a good wife someday" because I had begun mastering the task of cooking.  He didn't praise me for my high GPA throughout high school or for getting in the top ten percent of my graduating class.  No, no, it was my cooking that was noteworthy.  (As you can probably tell, we did not and do not have a good relationship)  I'm getting a little off track here.  The point I'm trying to make is, I don't know if it's my bitterness over the way I was treated growing up or if the ideas I have about gender roles would have been there regardless.  At any rate, I have come to see very few roles as specific to only one gender.  Yes, my husband is much better at repairing our vehicles, but he also enjoys doing it.  Yes, I'm much better at actually folding our laundry when it's washed & dryed, but that is mostly because I despise ironing.  The only thing I can think of off the top of my head that cannot & is not done by both sexes is being pregnant.  In our household I do still carry most of the responsibility for housework & meals, but I include (read: force) my husband in the responsibilities.  I do it partly out of a feeling of inequality between the load we carry in terms of running our home, but also because I want my son to learn that he needs to know how to cook & clean just as much as his future wife does.  I cherish the times when he wants to help me make cookies in the kitchen and try to encourage his interest in cooking.  As he's getting older, we're giving him more responsibility and I have started insisting that he pick up after himself.  I refuse to become the mom that waits on her children hand & foot and goes after them picking up their dirty socks strewn all over the house.

Guess that's my rant for the day.  

Thanks, Kristen, for bringing up the topic.