A love-filled and joyful Valentine's Day to everyone, plus a belated "Happy Birthday" to my friend V in Virginia and a good luck to my friends L and K who might have a baby today.
As for us, we exchanged cards this morning and the kids received two new puzzles (not because I think you should get gifts today but because I'd found them two days ago at Target--DS and DD have recently graduated from peg puzzles with single pieces in a hole to jigsaw puzzles. And we didn't have any.)
Perhaps apropos for a holiday about love and pink and hearts, we woke up in full princess mode. DD went to bed normal and this morning she is a Princess. I think it must be because there was a Little Bear episode recently entitled "Princess Duck." Getting dressed this morning, she chose a dress Ar-Ma got in Thailand, a Western party dress with white taffeta skirt and tuile overlay with a red velvet top and little ribbon flowers. Right colors for today, though more summer than February. And so, when we got downstairs, she twirled around and hopped up and down, checking out the physics of her skirt. She hasn't been in a skirt since Christmas and not regularly since summer. She was even talking about herself in the third person--"The Princess likes to eat." Then she wanted a crown, so I made a paper one and we affixed sticky flowers and butterflies. When I took it off to size it, she said, "Now I am just plain ----."
Never plain, DD, never plain.
For those of you who have assumed I am anti-Princess or anti-girly because I'm kind of a granola lesbian, I'm not. I had several princess phases myself, including Princess Leia and Queen Guenevere, as well as Snow White and Belle. I loved dressing up in long skirts (still do, you should see me in Ren Faire season!) and always wanted a fru-fru dress of the kind she has on now. What I am against is girls growing up to believe all they can be is pretty and decorative, that their only goal in life should be to find Prince Charming. I don't like the early maturation and sexualization, especially objectification of girls these days, very much abetted by the adult women in their lives (my friend Lambeth sends me articles and stories about the trials of boyhood, mainly because I know nothing about boyhood. But in all truth, it is girlhood in our society that scares me more). I also don't like the marketing barage--Disney has something like 200,000 different Princess Collection items alone--being special shouldn't be about what kinds of things you can buy. So, we're going to stress positive princess values--being strong and smart and doing good. It is no coincidence that DD's Chinese name has the same base as Mulan.
Or that we called her "The Empress" at birth.
Mind you, empresses beat out princesses anyday.
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