Seven going on seventeen

Annabelle, my second-grader, has a boyfriend. She came home last week telling me that this boy - we'll call him Romeo - asked her if she had a boyfriend. "No," she answered shyly. "Why, do you have a girlfriend?"

And so it began.

The next day, Romeo disclosed to Annabelle that he already had a girlfriend, technically, but that she could be his "number two." She was game, although it did seem to weigh on her a bit as she confessed her secondary status to me on the way home from school.

The day after that, I saw Romeo for the first time, as he walked Annabelle out of the front doors to the car pick-up line. He was cute, and he seemed really into her. I caught him looking at her once she was in the van and buckled up, bubbling over with stories of her day.

Then, he bumped her up to "first girlfriend" status. I asked Annabelle what it meant to her to be someone's girlfriend. She explained that the two of them are together all the time, and had even gone for a romantic walk at recess. "A 'romantic' walk?" I asked, eyes bugging out. "Yeah," she grinned. "We were about to hold hands, but the whistle blew and we had to go back inside."

Phew.

Annabelle and her boyfriend have been joined at the hip (not literally, I hope) throughout the day: during morning work time, at music class, in the cafeteria. But yesterday, this Lunchtime Lothario announced to her that he wasn't sure that he wanted "to be with her anymore." She kept silent and went back to work on her Christopher Columbus coloring pages, unphased. Later, he approached her again with a similar pronouncement. This time she warned him, "You'll have to tell a lot of people you changed your mind, then, because you told everybody about us." (This had been a source of great embarrassment for her - she'd have preferred keeping things on the DL.) He backed off immediately and claimed that he'd never really wanted to stop being her boyfriend. Then he gave her an Arthur sticker.

I am blown away by these developments. Aren't boys supposed to be blind to the opposite sex until, like, middle school? I thought it was the girls who were supposed to be the first aggressors, what with their earlier development, maturity, and Disney princess movies. I can't believe that this little boy has been trolling the schoolyard for girlfriends. Plural.

And hey, where is Little Cassanova learning this behavior? Who is the kid's dad, Hef??