Open house at my daughter’s preschool is always a fun experience. The kids create arts and crafts to decorate the classrooms for weeks in advance. During this preparation time, there is a drought of classwork coming home. So on open house day there’s a lot to see. Every surface except the floor is covered in drawings, sculptures, mobiles, photographs, finger paints, and other fine art media like popcorn and macaroni.

There are also writings that the kids dictated to the teachers where they expound on subjects like their favorite foods and what their parents are like. On one wall, each child wrote what they wanted to be when they grew up. Our daughter isn’t as hot on the idea of being a policewoman/mermaid as she once was and now wants to be a lifeguard. (I haven’t mentioned to her the practicality of being a lifeguard/mermaid yet.) For Mother’s day, the girl brought home a card with a fill-in-the-blank survey about her mom – sort of a mommy trading card. It read something like this: I love my Mommy. She’s the best Mommy. My Mommy is the best because [she’s a good cooker]. My Mommy is [33] years old. My Mommy weighs [515] pounds. If you asked her again how much her mom weighed, she’d be just as likely to say “fourteen inches!” or “negative orange!”

One of the things I find most interesting are the drawings. The kids do lots of family portraits and it’s fun to see how they perceive their parents and siblings. It’s fascinating to see the relative sizes of each family member, placement on the page, whether they are smiling or not, etc. Another especially intriguing thing to note are the differences between the boys’ drawings and the girls’. Invariably the girls draw long eyelashes on anything female and the boys do not. Girls seem to equate long eyelashes with femininity. Hair, clothes, and eyelashes are the primary ways they differentiate male and female figures. And not just on drawings of people. Lobsters don’t wear clothes and they don’t have hair. But they do have eyes. And if a little girl draws a girl lobster you can bet that lobster will have the longest cutest eyelashes you’ve ever seen.