Theo ... my fine young son ... *err* ... is he?

Theo's my boy ...

Born in 1998 and with distinct features in his face of his dad (ME, *wahey*!!!) and the family of his grandad, indirectly the family has laid all their hopes on him. The hunt for similarities is inevitably on whenever a kid resembles someone, but the little boy has been showing a few weird interests and habbits over the last few years ...
Physically, Theo's undoubtedly a son to his father, but in some aspects of his character, you'd give him some qualities of my brother Luc. He's quite introvert, intelligent and stubborn (which.I'm probably less.)
He's quite able to play by himself for hours with his toy-cars, which is quite normal considering the fact that his first word was "auto", NOT "mama" or "dada" or "papa". NOPE "auto" in Dutch it was, complete with the perfect pronunciation, turning other mums in awe at the perfect ability of speech by the youngster. The disillusion of the audience that this turned to be his only word ran really deep. Yet, his diphthong in "auto" as a word was so perfect ...
His "wheels-focus" developed without any problem. He knew the different car-logos driving around before he was three, recognizing the mothers of his fellow-students at kindergarten and calling out to us who was driving which kind of car whenever a similar type of car passed us. The fishing stand at the fun-fair always produced a new set of wheels and now that he's eight, he still takes to the floor with a die-cast companion to stress out. It sometimes feels like he's a Buddhist. Instead of humming "OOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHMMMMMMM!" he simply drops down and starts with "BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRMMMMMMMM!" and away goes all his stress of the working day at school. You'd sometimes wish it was all that simple ...
So what's weird about all that? Nothing really, he's a little more introvert, he's doing allright at school, but as a proud straight heterosexual male-chauvinist-pig father, I got quite a shock whenever he brought home a pair of Barbie-pink pumps from that same fishing-stand from the funfair. His second fishing round had produced a set of plastic jewelry, with a little Miss World-like crown, ear-clips and a necklace.
When he was nearly four, we had a Scottish piperband over in our village. I had walked the streets with Theo behind the band, enjoying the music. Theo had thoroughly enjoyed this and the week after he asked me to put on some music by the "Scotters".
Picture this!
Theo had found a brown blanket which had a bit of a tartan pattern, with black, white and yellow lines to form the tartan-squares. He neatly folded this up to make a skirt and put it around his waist. He took a yellow scarf and rolled that one up to go over his shoulder across his chest down to his kilt, just like a bandmaster. Add a hobby-horse to that, which he held like a Marines drum-major by the stick and off he went on "Scotland the Brave" around the table in the livingroom.
I sometimes wondered afterwards whether this incident set him off into "other directions".
The pink pumps went on his feet, the jewelry he wore with pride. He combined this with a set of short white summer pj's and all of a sudden, my fine young boy nearly looked like a go-go girl from the thirties, ready to dance along to Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher". The weirdest thing of all was that he looked EXCELLENT in it. The tapping of his pumps on our kitchen floor drove us practically mad, but he surely had the legs for it.
Theo now still loves to cross-dress. He got a long skirt that his gran used to wear. A white one with black speckles, which at first he used to wear and spin around in, like the Turkish Dervish. Lately, he's become more creative, undressing to his trunks and pulling up the skirt just under his shoulders and wearing that like a dress. He tied ribbons to the rim of his top. My mother, who gave that skirt to him, was quite surprised at the sight of her granson in her old stuff, marching by like a mannequin. I should have taken pics, I know ...
And everyone says he's got a great eye. The little boy's got taste, he knows how to dress, he's creative. We get comments that he'll probably make a good fashion-designer but everytime when he cross-dresses, my sisters sighs and worriedly tries to assure us that we'd better not fight the nature of our little boy.
I think I'm about this far that I won't do that, if I want to see him happy, but I have to admit that my sister is genuinely getting on our nerves, always repeating that we can't fight Theo's nature ...
The more she says it, the more I feel nervous about it all. Yet, whenever I saw him look at some other girls, I still think there's hope ...
We'll know more when his voice drops in a few years time ....