I Might Be Raising a Mini-Me. Uh-oh or Okay?

Since it was, oh, all of 10-degrees or so in New York City this weekend, we stayed inside. Hibernating in a NYC apartment--sans cool basement with lots of toys or fun stuff--can be a lesson in patience. If you know me, you know I need daily lessons in that subject (more on that later). But eventually, it was finally time for lunch and a nap for my youngest.

And what did my son want to do during that precious two hours of having mom all to himself (dad was still out of town)? He wanted to play a reading game. Followed by completing, oh, about 20 pages of a reading and writing workbook he pulled out from a pile of more fun activity books. This is a kid who ASKS to do his homework. A kid who blew through the first three levels of the sight words his kindergarten teacher assigned. A kid who read--with very, very little sound-it-out assistance--two first-grade level BOB books.He even talks about going to college (woah there, slow down, my boy).

Wait, it gets better (at least in the mini-me-ness). My son loves newspapers. Wait, no. That's an understatement. He really loves newspapers. He begs his dad to buy him one on weekends. He told one of my bosses--totally unprompted--that when he gets bigger he's going to "make a newspaper that goes all the way up to the sky" because the one the man at the subway station gives him (the AMNY) "isn't big enough and doesn't have enough stories." Granted, he goes straight for the sports section. But then he practices writing down the names of teams--any sport, any level--and their game scores from the day before. Voila! Practical math--how many points did the Jets lose by?

When I was his age or close to it, I loved to read. I loved school. I talked about college. And I distinctly recall being drawn to newspapers, although I suspect it was for different reasons.Although at the moment my son most often insists--when pressed--that he wants to be either a New York Yankee (shudder) or a street cleaner driver, he's started to sometimes answer that he wants to be a newspaper maker. I think he means journalist.

I'm not sure if I should encourage that or tell him he'd be better off operating the street cleaner. I surely love my profession, but like any, it has its downsides. And my husband--rightly so--thinks news organizations are screwed-up places to work. Corporate America, it seems, has less of a neurotic, crazy person tolerance. Or so he claims. But, it's also a career and a profession that becomes more than a job, it's often part of who you are as a person--or at least it is for me.

Granted, he's also a kid who studies the mechanics of carousels to try to figure out how his horse is moving up and down, so perhaps he'll end up an engineer or merry-go-round maker. All the same, maybe I shouldn't have dressed my son in that "Journalist In Training" onesie so often? Or maybe I should go with it--after all, despite the headaches and heartaches, I have loved being a journalist.

What do you think? Would you recommend your profession to your children? Why? Why not?

(Photo of "word nerd" onesie from Cafe Press.)