My princess problem

Sure, my girls love princesses. But I'm an enabler of the worst kind. If it's Disney and it wears a dress, they probably have its manifestation in doll form in not 1, not 2, but 3 sizes. And pajamas….books…and games. And 9 times out of 10, they didn't even ask for it. I can't help it. I think I love having these princess things around more than they do. As evidenced by the Disney princess calendar hanging in our bedroom.

There's princess bedlam in our house:

Clockwise from top left: 1. princess toddler dolls fill our shopping cart. Carina pretends they are pirates and they sail in the shopping cart pirate ship. 2. "squishy" princess dolls on Carina's bed. They are not all hers, she plundered a few from Aurelia's crib. This is a nightly occurrence. 3. princess orgy in the garage of their dollhouse. There are usually more naked ones than there are today. 4. princess figurines. I think we have close to 30 of them. Yikes.

I was mostly a tomboy growing up and couldn't be bothered with anything even remotely girly, so I'm not sure where this obsession has come from. As a matter of fact I much preferred animals (The Lion King was my favorite movie) to dolls and at any given moment until I was probably 12 15 you could find stuffed animals strewn about my bedroom.

And then I birthed girls. Maybe I'm living vicariously through them since I essentially ignored Ariel, Belle, and Jasmine when I was a little girl. No surprise -- I preferred Flounder & Sebastian, Lumiere (he's the shit, no?) and Abu & Rajah. After I saw Tangled for the first time I put the soundtrack on loop every day (even further confession: I LOVE Mandy Moore). Little baby Carina loved to dance to the songs.

Our trip to Disney in December only served to fuel the fire. We had dinner with the princesses at Norway in Epcot and I think we met and photographed the girls with each and every princess we could find.

Okay, not quite princesses - but hilarious nonetheless

And don't tell Mike, but I'm already looking into planning a return trip, hopefully right before Christmas 2015. Maybe? (Pretty please, Mike?)

Then we saw Frozen. I've been completely sucked in, and so have the girls. The fact that the story is about two sisters helps me justify watching it over and over again and thank goodness the merchandise is sold out everywhere or else I'm sure we'd have too much of it. I must have ALL THE PRINCESS THINGS.

They can thank the "Easter bunny" for our latest acquisitions:

Merida & Cinderella dress-up dresses

Sofia the First & Tinkerbell hair clips

::sigh:: I {clearly} need a princess intervention.

BUT HOW CAN YOU NOT LOVE THIS?

Things our children will never experience

While waiting for my computer to connect to our wireless internet the other day, I reminisced about how long it took to successfully dialup on AOL -- err -- America Online, back in 1996. The sound of the dialing, the waiting, the screechy tones followed by static, then {quite often} failure. Then you try a different number, giddy when you finally hear the familiar "WELCOME!" and off you go to inform everyone in a super cool chatroom that you are 12/f/ma

I'm sure that Carina and Aurelia will spend their fair share of time online in the {far far away} future, but they will never experience the joy of the lightning spreading across the screen as AOL connects or the pain of having their connection interrupted by the neighbor calling the land line. Ha, $10 says they won't even know what a land line is...

I weep that they will also never get to enjoy:

• Watching and rewinding a VHS tape over and over to the point where even the tracking won't fix that messed up picture
• Talking on the phone in the kitchen in front of the whole family because the cord won't reach into the other room
• Sitting in the way back seat of a station wagon, watching and harassing the cars behind them

But that trunk seat sounds like fun, Mom!

Okay sarcasm aside, there are a few things that I really am sad that they likely won't experience, such as:

• Selling Girl Scout cookies door to door. I wish they still did this for my sake, too. Momma needs 4 boxes of Samoas STAT.
• Running around the neighborhood mostly unsupervised all day long...exploring the woods and biking to friends' houses without a care in the world.
• The old McDonald's Playland. The Grimace shaky thing rocked my world. Plastic ball pits just don't measure up.

Lament away. What joys of growing up will your kids never experience?

Teach your kids not to be dbags

I'm starting a new series of posts. Whenever something pops into my head that I think everyone should teach their kids, I'll be sharing it with you. Wait, wait! Don't run away yet.

This won't be a collection of do it my way or else I'm going to judge you, you bad bad Mommy you or I really think you should parent like this because it's so much better - look, here I'll even cite sources posts. I think hope you know by now that I'm just not that kind of person.

Rather, it will be an assortment of things that - if everyone out there had been taught - would have saved me a lot of pain, sadness, and frustration at some point in my life. And others, too, of course.

So let's begin - with my adolescent awkwardness.

Me (right) and my sisters, ca. 1996

Bad acne. Horrible braces. Scary hair. No confidence whatsoever. And to top it off? A fuzzy chickie backpack (WTF?) As you can see here I was quite the epitome of cool.

Closer up, around 1998: doesn't my Mom look good? Me, on the other hand...

I was just all sorts of awkward, and almost everyone around me let me know it. I was barked at by kids on the bus and excluded by my group of so-called friends because I {and I quote} "wasn't hot enough to get any guys". Is it sad that I still remember that 15 years later? Even my sisters made fun of me on a regular basis (we're tight now; it's all good). On my 14th birthday, a "friend" called to invite me to see Titanic in the movie theater and said she'd call me later. When I hadn't heard from her by late afternoon, I called back and her Mom told me she was out at the movies. ::gutpunch:: <~~~Yep, looking back I totally laugh at this and how dramatic I was, but in my 14-year-old mind, it was akin to the end of the world.

At times I felt like my only allies were my Mom and my teachers. Which is probably why, in retrospect, I always made homework my priority and straight A's my mission. I threw myself into my studies and tried my best to let all the taunting roll off my back. Not always so easy, though...I ended up going to see a therapist for some time. Shortly thereafter we ended up moving to a new town which gave me the opportunity to completely start over. I never looked back and things just got better and better.

So...on to my point. Teach your kids not to be little jerks. I know we can't control everything our kids do, especially when they are not under our supervision all the time, but showing them how it feels so much better to be nice to someone than to be an ass really isn't that hard or time consuming. And if you ever find out that your kids have been bullying or teasing another child? Take action. Please don't shrug it off and mutter, "kids will be kids".

I was fortunate in that I found solace in my Mom and in my textbooks. And on the bullying severity spectrum? Mine was quite mild. Many other kids have not been so lucky. I just read that a 7-year-old (7 EFFING YEARS OLD) committed suicide on Wednesday because of bullying. I can't even...

Seriously, teach your kids not to be dbags.


What was your experience like growing up? Were you ever bullied? Have your kids been bullied?