Being different

When Spencer was in the 18-24 month classroom at his school, there were two girls in his class both named O. As they all turned two, they were assigned to one of the two different toddler classes for the next age grouping, and the O's were split up. Spencer isn't particularly close with them, but we hear about all of his friends from time to time. Yesterday he was telling me a story about "the O that is in my class, not the O who is in the other class." He continued on "the one that is in my class is a little bit different." And at this point I froze and sucked in a breath. O in his class has a (repaired) cleft lip, and I was horrified to think that at this age kids (my kid) were already focusing in on something like this and categorizing it as different. It didn't really make sense either - his school (and Houston) is so ethnically diverse Spencer sees so many "different looking" kids all the time. I was trying to gently ask what he meant by different, without encouraging him to focus on a birth defect. He replied "Well, they are similar. But one has brown hair and one has black, so they don't match. They are different." Oh.