Zoë has boyfriends.  Yes that is boyfriend with an “s”.  As in more than one boyfriend.  We hear her on the phone pretend talking to them:

“Hello boyfriend.” in a sing-songy voice.

Every time she does that, I can feel Bill’s head begin to swell.  He isn’t prepared for it to start this early (or at all–let’s be honest, what father is ever ready for his little girl to like a boy?).  She is only 4.

The other night at dinner she was talking about her boyfriend and talking about how she was playing with him at recess.

“Playing with him or following him around?” I asked.  Because I know how girls operate and I know Zoë and how she operates.  I also know that we are totally in for trouble as she gets older.

“Playing I think.  We chased Eva.”

“Sounds fun.”

“I asked Finnegan (a different boy than she calls “boyfriend”) to marry me.”

At this point, I thought Bill was going to just pass out.  He surmises that he has the ability to handle 8 years of this boy stuff with his little princess.  And at this rate, he’ll be completely unable to cope by the time she is 12.  Poor guy. He has no idea what he is in for.  Well, maybe he does have some idea and that is why he is beginning to freak out a little.

“Zoë, you don’t ask the boy–you wait for him to ask you.”  Bill explained, clearly uncomfortable with the way this conversation was going.  I am pretty sure that he would have rather been talking about ANYTHING but this.

“Well, that’s dumb.  But he said no.” she said while giggling (she is channeling some serious pre-teen/teen girlie traits).

Just hearing her pretending to talk to her boyfriend on the phone and her ability to mimic what she surely will sound like as a teenager is amazing to me–she doesn’t have older siblings to have learned this from–she doesn’t watch “regular” tv, so that isn’t informing her pretend choices–she is simply expressing herself and it scares the shit out of me.  I can’t even fathom what the next decade (and beyond) is going to hold.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the universe is going to pay me back in spades for what I did as a teenage girl and I am not looking forward to that.  I don’t know if Bill can survive it.  Zoë might simply be locked in her room until she is 30.