Princessess

I have been absent from this blog for awhile now. Life has been busy. But I have struggling with a recent event and feel the need to unload it into the written word.  Addie, for the last couple years, has been in love with fairies and princesses, with a brief obsession with ponies a couple months ago. She frequently wears wings and 99% of the time wants to wear dresses or something pretty and fancy. I love that she has a style of her own and that she wants to dress herself. She recently had her dance recital and has been excited to wear her recital dress on all non-school days (much like what happened  two years ago) I think she loves the attention she gets when she wears something so super fancy. She loves the comments of "Oh! How beautiful!" "You must be a princess!" "Look at the beautiful little princess!" She stands up a little taller and walks a little slower just to make sure everyone notices her.  I am happy that she has such a positive self-image but I worry a lot about it going to her head. I wish people would comment more on what books she likes to read, or what kind of artwork she is making or what she has recently learned in school. But people will comment on what is most noticeable and that, by Addie's design, is the sparkly glittery purple dress with matching hair clip.

I struggle especially with these fancy get-ups when she acts spoiled and whiney. For some reason a whining preschooler wearing jeans and a t-shirt seems very different than a whining preschooler wearing a fancy dress and a tiara. It shouldn't make a difference, whining is annoying and bad no matter what someone is wearing, but I guess when she is wearing something that resembles a pageant princess and is acting like how I imagine a lot of those little girls act...it's a little too much for me.

She wore this latest dance outfit to the Old Port Festival last weekend. While watching the parade I noticed a newspaper photographer notice Addie and begin to take pictures of her. Afterwards, he came over and asked us her name. This is not the first time this has happened. Addie said "I'm going to be in the paper, again?! I'm going to be famous!" Oh boy, I thought.  It's not that I don't want Addie to be in the paper, or even to maybe be famous some day, it's just that I hope I can somehow teach her to be humble and modest. How do you teach that?

After lunch at the festival, Mike and a friend took the kids to get balloons, the treats they picked. I was imagining that they would come back with a smallish balloon but when I went to find them they had (due to apparent selection issues) picked the largest most gaudy Disney Princess balloons for Addie and her friend. The balloons were HUGE. They were shaped like CASTLES. They had all of the disney princessess posing on both sides. There were TWO of them! And Addie and her friend absolutely loved them. I on the other hand couldn't have been more embarrassed.  These things were so huge that they were bopping everybody on the heads, tangling around things and just basically drawing more attention to the fact that I had a daughter dressed in a really fancy sparkly recital dress and a tiara. Normally companies pay for advertising. But we had just paid A LOT of money to do Disney's blimp advertising for them.  Mike wondered why I couldn't just get on board and be happy, after all it was the first time all morning that everyone else was happy. But I was just in a funk about it. I didn't like it at all. I felt bad though because Addie really likes this balloon.

Later on at home, I tried to explain it to Addie what my problem was. It's not that I don't like the Disney Princesses. I grew up watching those Disney movies and could even recite most of the lines and knew all of the lyrics to the songs. I think that some of the Princesses are even good role models. They are smart, spunky, challenging, adventurous, strong. What I don't understand and cannot tolerate is the lumped together "Disney Princesses" that seemingly pose together on large pink balloons, pink clothing, pink shoes, pink bags, etc. There is no story about all of them interacting together. It is just pure advertising. And it works. Little girls, including my daughter, want to buy stuff with those images. Fortunately, I do think that this is just a phase that Addie is going through. She is so wonderfully multi-dimensional. She is playing in the mud one day, directing and producing a campaign to combat litter the next, is always concerned about the welfare of others, and is so wise beyond her years. So if she likes to dress up really fancy and carry around a big balloon occasionally, I think that I could probably find a way to be equally multi-dimensional and be able to embrace that.