Snort, too funny. Sorry for your plight.
It's not the princess phase that I fear, but the Hana Montana, dress like a teen even though you're only 8 phase.
Nicely done.
And this is why I'm happy to have two boys. Even if they want to play princess, somehow it won't seem so bad.
What a fabulous satire.
So far we've kept Charlotte from the princess complex, although I was dismayed to find she can recognize a McDonalds in the distance. Sigh.
I can relate. As predicted, despite (or because of) filling our two and a half year old daughter's room with mid-century furniture and miesian doll houses, she would rather dress up as Cinderella and have a tea party.
I've got to love any blog entry with a passing reference to the Crimean War.
as it happens, i discovered a promotional can of Campbell's Princess Soup at work yesterday. it took a few minutes of staring at the label for me to figure out it was chicken noodle.
in vaguely related news, when i worked at an independent bookstore, i met an old man who said that as a child, he'd actually caught diptheria from a book (don quixote): the little boy who'd checked it out from the library just before him had coughed all over the pages, and they ended up side by side in cots at the hospital.
Crimean War? Not surprised. I'm sure Jim can recite "The Charge of the Light Brigade" from memory.
I'm with Amy on that Hannah Montana thing. That scares the bejeebers out of me!
I was reading this and wondering what I'd do when my future kids were into princess shit, but then I remembered that I was pretty into princess shit as a kid, and look at me now: I don't even brush my hair everyday.
Most of the time lately after reading your posts I think, "What the hell is he talking about?" Seems like you're going through something new in your writing. But challenging the reader can be a good thing and it's refreshing to have to actually think instead of just read more of the usual blather about ones day-to-day life.
Either that or I'm just stupid.
LOL
How glad am I that I don't have a daughter when I see the aisles of pink at Target? This was hilarious.
Wow! This gives a whole new fuchsia tinge to communism...loved it.
is it wrong that i get perverse pleasure when the pnut has the occasional accident in her precious princess pullups? sigh...
Love it.
What's wrong with princesses, exactly? Or, more specifically, what's wrong with childhood fantasies? My own childhood fascination with mutant ninja turtles and GI Joe hasn't led me to a life of Kung-fu or warfare.
I don't expect that my daughter will grow up with the anticipation of the world dangling on her string, either. It makes her happy to wear a dress and a cheap plastic necklace and THAT is what I care most about.
I think I started laughing out loud at "ha'penny". Poor Dutch.
damn sb.
I should have titled this: "Better Dead than Fuchsia."
I have a 2 1/2 year old princess-y niece and I have to recomend the Fancy Nancy books.
Fancy Nancy is the story of a high femme child (although her style is less princess and more a combination of French courtesan and crazy cat lady) raised by a pair of earnet, unfashionable college professor types.
The most wonderful subplot through the books is Nancy's schemes to outfit her khaki wearing, volvo driving parents in feather boas and tutus. So, obviously, I'm now thinking of Fancy Nancy meets Karl Marx.
Also, last I saw Her Royal Highness she, at two years old!, was stomping and muttering under her breath something like, "my mommy can't do anything right", all because Mommy doesn't know how to put in a sparkly pony-tail holder correctly.
Reading this and your blog in general makes me feel like i am actually not wasting my time on the internet.
scott, i thought your comment was similar to what the character of Jenny was saying in this play.
this is EXACTLY what it is like.
Oh, this is brilliant. I love the utter ruthlessness of the little princesses. Thrashing the coachman and whipping the Turks!! Yeah, why is it you don't hear about the savagery required to maintain an aristocracy in the Disney movies?
I think this also gives one a pretty good idea why socialist realism isn't a big hit with little girls.
My kid went from pretending to be a servant--doing the servile Cinderella thing that Marx would have approved of--to wistfully wishing we had servants. I was both dismayed and impressed with her 4 year old ability to figure out that certain (impossible and unethical) things might be to her advantage.
Actually, this makes me realize that every one of those Disney versions removes the guilt by making the privilege princesses get to have some kind of reward for terrible suffering (which is also creepy).
Eventually, the lure of privilege won out on our daughter--When we did something she didn't like one time, my kid complained that the next time, she was calling her guards.
We had various stratagems to make the princess thing less of a imagination trap and less boring. It's fine to pretend to be royalty but the Disney version is a tedious drag. Among the things we told her were that princesses sometimes go into the forest and live survivalist style, and wear animal skins, that they work with Robin Hood and steal from the rich and give to the poor. Martial arts played a role and somehow Snow White got mixed up with Ulysses. So now she can't stand to hear the straight version of the stories. She always asks for the mixed up version.
It may make you feel less isolated to know that when we took MiniMe to see Santa, the 'elf' asked her which Barbie she wanted, to which MiniMe responded with, "Bah-Beeeeeee?! She's plastic & from China!?"
OH. & you look nothing like Karl, silly man.
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