Ken and I often talk about the sorts of careers that Reid may seek out based on her behaviour as a young girl. When she was quite small and most interested in knocking over the towers of wooden blocks that we wood build for her, we talked about her being a military engineer. There was the time I thought she might want to be Rowdy Reidie the Wrestler, a cowboy phase, and our on-going conviction that Reid would find great success as an actress or, at the very least, a teenage drama queen.
More recently I’ve been thinking that Reid might find her calling as a lactation consultant. In addition to her nearly four years of first-hand experience, Reid has been practicing helping others to nurse. At various points over the years, Reid has brought her stuffed animals and dollies with her to nurse. Reid makes sure that their heads are in an appropriate position to receive the milkies that she loves so much. She was sharing with Thomas, the Care Bear, one night last week when she experienced an “aha moment”. She stopped nursing and went to find Baby-with-a-round-mouth (not all of the stuffies and dollies are lucky enough to get a people name). The doll in question came with a soother and so has a mouth that is formed into an “o”, rather than the traditional wide-mouth of a nursing baby but it was certainly closer to the right thing than the smile sewn onto Thomas’ face.
Then again, Reid has always been interested in buses. She was tiny when she first fell in love with school buses and has since generalized this love to all buses. She had been able to twist her tongue, more or less, around “articulated” to describe the extra-long city buses we see on the streets of Ottawa. On Sunday, we saw the Lady Dive Tours‘ amphibus. I explained that it was a sort of bus-boat. Reid liked the idea and wondered if it was a double-decker bus. I explained that it wasn’t and Reid told me that when she is bigger, she will have a double-decker boat-bus. She and I would drive the lower floor and Daddy would drive the top floor, she said. Upon further reflection, Reid decided that she wanted a really long bus so that the whole world could ride if they wanted. I proposed an articulated bus and Reid agreed that would be good. (I write this so that I can prove to the teenage Reid that she didn’t always think that I was clueless.)
On the way to Reid’s optometrist appointment on Wednesday, Ken had explained that she would be seeing another kind of doctor, drawing a parallel between our family doctor, dentist and the optometrist. He told her that he, himself, was a different kind of doctor – a doctor of history. Once home they told me of the discussion and she said that Ken was a big doctor of history and she wanted to be a little doctor of history. Ken and I thought that was a good thing. But then Reid suggested that I could be a middle-sized doctor of history. Ken and I both said “no” (though he was perhaps a bit more forceful than me). We explained that Daddy had worked long and hard to be a doctor of history and that I hadn’t done that work. Reid likes the exclusive club of being the little doctor of history to Ken’s big doctor of history.
In the end, though, I’m left wondering if the career Reid will have even exists yet. She speaks about being an astronaut sometimes. Maybe that will be more of a reality than most of the jobs that come to our minds at present.