When I Grow Up, I'm Gonna be a...

Pumpkin has a DVD that has a segment with a little girl, no older than three, who does a ballet routine. Pumpkin loves that part, and always gets up from the couch to do the dance along with the video. She gracefully raises and lowers her arms to the music. It's sweet, and makes me want to enroll her in a dance class. I'll probably do just that, but only to give her a chance to see if she likes it, not as a chance for me to push her into a dance career. Given her genetics, it wasn't gonna be much of a career anyways. Thinking about imposing a career choice on a child reminded me of a conversation my mom once had about me. She was at a meeting with a group of people whom she wasn't all that well acquainted with. They all just met once a month to discuss co-op finances. I guess they had wrapped up the business part of the meeting and ended up talking about their kids, and what the kids were going to be when they grew up. We are talking about fairly young kids here, so I imagine that the parents were just engaging in wishful thinking. One parent talked about how his kid was going to be a doctor, and used the child's good grades in school as proof. Another parent went on to say that her son was probably going to be a baseball player, sighting his success in little league as reason for believing this. "MY daughter is going to be a ballerina!", bragged another parent. By this time, my mother was rolling her eyes at the stupidity of this discussion, and said matter-of-factly, "When my daughter grows up, she's going to be a prostitute. I know this because she never comes home at night." The meeting was adjourned.