Tonight poop crashed my phone!

Ok so every parent is in awe of their child – or so they jolly well should be!
Tonight however my daughter blew me away with her inquisitive nature.
By chance she had sneaked into my bedroom to read on my bed and took a glance at my twitter feed, she spotted a picture of a Roman toilet.

Romans and toilets – for an eight year old child it doesn’t get better than that. She instantly wanted to know if there was any fossilised Roman poop. (Fossils being another love of hers) I’ve always strived to nurture her inquisitive nature and so suggested we tweet a response to find out.

Wow! What a response! We couldn’t have dreamed for a better response. A whirlwind of replies from some wonderful female archeologists, to the extent that my poor phone could no longer cope and promptly gave up!

An exciting ten minutes, an incredible conversation, an introduction to some fabulous ladies and above all that I got to use the poop emoji to my heart’s content. 😉

You’d be forgiven for thinking ‘so what?’.

In the morning the effect of this conversation when I show my dear girl is going to be monumental. Rewind a few years to her sixth birthday, she wanted to go to the Natural history and Science museum.
We had a fab day, she explored, pondered and sucked up the experience like a little sponge of knowledge. The last activity of the day was an interactive feature in the Science museum, she was happily answering questions when presented with a visual choice to select her gender.
She obviously knew the answer, she just didn’t identify with either of the images on the screen. She clearly knew she wasn’t a male, so the blue stick man wasn’t her, but equally she wasn’t the girl in the pink dress either, heaven forbid we ever suggest she wear a dress, especially a pink one! My heart sank as she looked at me totally lost ‘Well which one should I press then?’ We discussed it and I think we went for a boy in the end, much to the horror of the preteen lad across the console.
She weighed up her interests and just found she couldn’t identify with that pink expectation.
A few years on and she has a much better sense of identity – I’d be curious to see which button she’d press these days.
She’s very comfortable in her skin, happy that she is a girl, albeit not a girly one. She’s also figured that she’s not a tom boy either, and that’s ok.
She has a good group of friends who love her the way she is, they play Harry Potter and How to train your dragon at lunchtimes. Not football. Not skipping.
When we go to park she’ll have an initial play on the equipment and then spends her time foraging around for interesting finds. She’s aware that most of the other children aren’t doing that. It however just makes me immensely proud.

Normally I’d not encourage my children to engage with social media – there is plenty of time for that yet, but tomorrow I will let her read the thread and explore some of the discussed blogs at her leisure. She will see a group of confident, interesting and quite frankly in my opinion powerful women who share her interests and passions. What an empowering message for her. Reaffirmation that it’s quite ok to like different things, to follow your passions and be inquisitive and that no, you didn’t fit into either category at the museum and that’s ok too.

In fact it’s bloody brilliant!

To all involved in poop tweet. I salute you!