When I say: "But Mum is a girl," they say I'm okay - phew.
I figure much of this is what they pick up from TV and other kids because I spend a lot of time correcting them. There are not girl-colours and boy-colours and girls and boys can play any sport they want.
It is starting to pay off. Mr Five wanted to play rugby this year but the junior teams were oversubscribed, so he went with his second choice - ballet.
I am not sure where ballet came from but he is up to his third Saturday morning class now.
I warned the teacher that if he walked in and said: "Gross, it's only girls and they're wearing pink" and walked back out never to return, not to take it personally.
But he loved it - lots of running around, pretending to be bears, chasing each other then leaping through the air.
For me it was fantastic.
My late uncle was in the New Zealand Ballet and actually went to the same dance school as a child.
Who knows how long Mr Five will last or whether he has any special talent, but I am loving him getting diverse experiences while he is young - plus no standing on the sidelines on a rainy miserable Saturday for me.
I also took an opportunity to talk to him about consent the other day. Maybe that seems weird when he is only five years old, but I think the sooner you talk about these concepts, the more children build it into their world view.
Mr Five doesn't like being kissed most of the time - a bit of rejection for Mum. So I said to him that one day he might want to kiss girls but he was not allowed to kiss them if they didn't want it and he always had to check first, every time.
I didn't get the, "Aww gross, Mum," so it is possible he took it in.
I'm not sure what is going on with Prime Minister John Key and the ridiculous and intimidating ponytail-pulling saga in which he regularly pulled the hair of a young waitress working in his local cafe.
I'd like to think my boys, even at 5 and 3, would not repeatedly pull another child's hair without knowing it was wrong, but apparently our PM didn't.
He even claimed it wasn't a sexist thing because he would "hypothetically" have done it to guy, too. I doubt it.
The only good thing that has come from this is it allows sunlight to hit an area of sexist and threatening behaviour that remains in our remarkable country, even if these shadows are not always obvious to those who have not experienced them.
Nicola Young has worked in the government and private sectors in Australia and NZ and now works from home in Taranaki for a national charitable foundation. Educated at Wanganui Girls' College, she has a science degree and is the mother of two boys.
