SOME years ago, after it became clear that my husband's
fate was to be a father of girls, he decided to mess with
nature.

The two eldest were still toddlers when he brought home a
set of cardboard blocks designed to look like bricks.
Within minutes, his plans to build a fort from which he
could command his cowboys to defend against outlaws went
badly awry. Instead, his daughters placed the blocks in
neat rows and draped cloth napkins across their
mid-sections.

"They're playing day-care center and the blocks are babies
in cribs," he reported. He looked badly shaken. "They want
me to put a block on my shoulder and burp it."

Next, he tried water pistols. The girls wrote their names
in water against a wall. He even brought home a motorized
robot kit. He ended up assembling it while the girls
designed furniture for its use. "A droid does not need a
coffee table," he complained. "A droid blows things up."

For a while, I thought my husband had given up on his dream
of captivating his girls with his favorite boy toys. Then
one day last week, I walked into the kitchen and tripped
like Lucille Ball over a tiny radio-controlled car that was
zipping past the dishwasher. The dinky red Mazda RX-7
careered around a water bowl with the dog in feverish
pursuit.

"My turn!" shrieked Clementine, 5, trying to wrest the
controls from Ella, 11.

"Mom, she hit me, put her in her room," Ella said.

"Tell
them to share the car," said Zoe, 13.

My husband crouched under the table, propping a playing
card on a matchbox. "Ramp," he explained. He wore the smug
grin of a man who finally had found a toy with irresistible
cross-gender (and cross-species) appeal.