Princess Bride

Thirty-seven years ago my mom woke me up bright and early....well, it wasn't bright, it was so early it was still dark out.  I want to say it was around 4am, but I could be mistaken.  I was only a little over 2 after all.  She woke me up so we could watch Princess Di marry Prince Charles together.  The whole "event watching" must have taken a couple of hours, but in my hazy memory, I can only remember about 30 seconds or less of it.  I can remember being up with my mom and knowing it was uber early, I can remember my dad coming home from work and laughing at us, shaking his head and calling us goofballs or something for waking up so early to watch strangers get married, and I remember Di arriving in her horse-drawn carriage, and I think it was that moment that I became enamored by the idea of princesses and beautiful wedding gowns.

I remember thinking how beautiful she was, and I was glued to the TV, amazed at her train that seemed to be miles long.  In fact, that was one of my requirements for my own wedding dress 28 years later, it had to have a decent length train.  It paled in comparison to Di's, but it made me feel like a princess nonetheless.  I'm actually quite surprised I remember even that much.  All these years I had always assumed I was 4 or 5, but a couple years ago I looked up the date and couldn't believe when I saw that their wedding date was July 29, 1981 and I had just turned 2, three months earlier at the beginning of May.  My dad swears up and down that I must be mistaken, there is no way I could remember something that far back.  He is certain I watched it when I was older, on vhs or something, but my mom wouldn't have been so cruel to have woken me up before dawn to watch a tape.  Besides, I am sure it was many years later that we got a VCR, and even later that we even owned an actual store-bought tape.  All of our movies and shows were taped off from tv.

So this past Saturday, I woke up at 5:45am...this was after going to bed at 1:30am.  I woke up thinking, why in the hell am I doing this?  Oh right, because I've been waiting years and years to have a little girl to watch a royal wedding with.  I begrudgingly had to go to work on the morning of William and Kate's wedding because I didn't have any sick days at the time, but I did get to see her "long walk" and her arrival to Westminster Abbey  We had not yet begun trying to get pregnant (we would just a few weeks from then) but I was still so sad I didn't have kids yet, especially a little girl to make this special memory with and I was so hoping Prince Harry would find someone in the years to come, and hopefully it would coincide with me having a daughter and her being old enough to at least remember as much as I did.  And here we are! 

So I stretched the sleepies away and went in to wake Emmy up.  I was happy she woke up in pretty good spirits.  She's a morning person, but it has to be on her terms.  I quite often wake up to her singing over the monitor, but if I have to wake her up, she's generally not too happy.  The night before we had ran around town, trying to find the props I wanted for this day.  We got some plastic champagne flutes at the dollar store, but to my dismay they did not have anything resembling sparkling grape juice or tiaras, so we were off to Target.  I was bummed since I was trying to do it on the cheap since most of the stuff would be thrown away after, but I found a couple tiaras in the birthday party section, and the sparkling grape juice was much cheaper than I expected.

So we turned on the TV just in time to see Meghan's car begin the "long walk", we had our tiaras on and we were sipping our "champagne".  Emily was playing much of the time and wasn't super interested, but she did seem intrigued when I told her about when I was a little girl, and I watched the groom's mom and dad get married with my mom.  And she did come snuggle in my lap and we watched as the new duchess arrived at the chapel and debuted her dress.  It was a nice moment with my little girl, and one I hope she remembers long after she is an adult.  Maybe one day her and her daughter can wake up early and watch George, Charlotte, or Louis get married.  Or maybe one of the newlywed's kids, that is if they plan to have any.  I would guess they're expected to, even though Harry's kids would be so far down the line.  But hey you never know, what if William abdicated and for one reason or another none of his children took the throne either.  Stranger things have happaned. 

So Emily is in swim lessons right now which I am sure I have mentioned.  This week is actually her last for the summer...I figure with camping trips and stuff we'll be too busy to make it, and she swims in her Nana's pool every week, why pay for lessons when we can just reinforce what they have been teaching her all summer, and then pick them back up in the fall.  Plus I want to sign her up for tennis, and possibly soccer.  She loves to run around the yard and kick the ball around.  Each week, they call us in for class, I walk her to her lane and her teacher, she sits on the side of the pool on her little turtle kickboard and I tell her ok have fun, love you.  I wave goodbye, and if I catch her eye again as I am walking out of the pool area, I wave again and she smiles and waves.

Now, I've been a full fledged adult for a long time now.  I've owned a home for almost 9 years, I've had a good job for 13, I've been married for 7.5 and I've been a mom for 5.  But there are still days when I just don't feel like an adult, and I have to pinch myself and it's still kind of surreal to think about the fact that wow, I'm an adult...I'm a wife and a mother.  How did that happen?  Well ok, I know how it happaned.  But I've noticed it most with swim lessons.  I am not sure why, because I did do other activities as a kid, but maybe the swim lessons sticks out because I had to take them for a couple summers, and I dreaded them.  To this day I am not super comfortable in water, and while I can swim, I am not a strong swimmer and I would prefer not to have to.  So perhaps because of that, my swim lessons stick in my memory from when I was a kid, and I was always nervous before every class.  A lot of reason was I was anxious about what we would be doing.  Would they make me try diving?  Going down to the bottom?  What if I got water up my nose.  I hated getting water up my nose.  But also because I was very shy, I didn't like having to go in without my mom, and I was always anxious that I wouldn't be able to find my class.

So it just always strikes me as I am walking out of the pool area, waving to my daughter, and giving her a reassuring smile that she will be fine and I'll be just outside watching, that it doesn't seem like all that long ago that I was being dropped off for swim lessons, but now I am the mom dropping my kid off for them.  It's just trippy. 

So Em has been going through a phase again.  It's not quite as awful as the one back in December, but that only lasted two weeks and this one has gone on longer.  She's been very whiney and complains a lot, but she is also not listening, like really not listening, and she's been back talking a lot.  She'll ask if we can do something and I'll say no, and she'll adamantly say yes!  The other day she was eating an apple, and per usual, only ate about a quarter of it.  I told her to go get a ziplock to put the rest of it in.  She says um, no.  You can.  I said Emily, go and get a ziplock.  She says, no thank you.  I like how she is at least polite while being a defiant brat.  I let it go, which kills me, but had I insisted, she likely would have thrown a fit and I would have had to send her to time out, and then she'd be crying and whining in time out.  Yes, I choose my battles, and this time I chose peace. 

I just feel like lately, more and more, my baby girl is slipping away and this little angry, hot tempered, sassy, back talking bigger girl has taken her place.  Like, when did this happen?  She's only four!  Is four really the dividing line between sweet baby and bratty big girl?  I know so much of what she does is all age appropriate, she is becoming more and more indepdendent by the day so she wants to push boundaries, make decisions for herself and gets mad when she is not able to.  I know she is not doing anything every other four year old on the planet has never done.  But sometimes it is so hard not to want to treat her like the much bigger girl she is trying to be, and realize she is still very little.  Like, she still loves to climb up in my lap, which I love.  But she'll do it with no regard for me...she'll lean over and dig her elbow into me as she gets comfortable, or she'll step on my thighs and plop herself down on my lap, not caring if she hurts me at all.  It's so frsutrating, I tell her over and over to be more careful and more aware of what she is doing, but she'll just do it again in a few minutes. 

That's when I get legitimately angry, and feel like she is doing it on purpose just to piss me off, even though in her little mind, she likely cannot make that connection,  I yell, and then I feel terrible for yelling.  But then ten minutes later she is off doing something else that she "knows she isn't supposed to do" but likely cannot retain that information, or does but is testing me, and then I'm yelling again.  But then, no matter how tough of a day I have had, the moment she is in bed, I miss her like crazy and I want to go crawl into bed with her and snuggle her and tell her what a good girl she is and how much I love her.  It's enough to make you insane.

She and I went out on a mommy-daughter date the other night.  My husband went to a concert, so I thought she and I would go out too.  I had planned on dinner and then ice cream, but she was begging for ice cream first.  I was about to argue back when I realized it may rain, so we should probably do ice cream first just in case.  The girl doesn't eat anything anyway, so it's not like the ice cream would spoil her dinner.  So we went to this place called the Dairy-go-round.  The building is shaped like a carousel and there are small carousel-like horses all around.  She was in her glory, she loves horses.  So I got her a cup of chocolate ice cream with m & m's and I got vanilla with reeese pieces.  She insisted on eating her ice cream while sitting on the horse.  After a while, she asked to try mine so I gave her a bite, and after a bit she says, let's switch.  So we switched cups, and not long later she says I'm done, I'll take mine back now.  Haha, wow.  Such a scammer.

So before we left, she had to try out all the other horses, especially since they were all different colors.  The only one she didn't get to try was the purple one, but it was occupied and she didn't look like she was going anywhere for a while.  Her Nana doesn't live too far from there, and the first time I had taken Em there a couple years ago was with her, so I told her I bet Nana would take her if she asked, and it would probably be a time of day when not many people were there and she could ride the purple one.  Before we left she had to say bye to the pink one, and she acted like she was taking her saddle and bridle off before putting her in her stable for the night.  So then we went for Chinese.  My husband isn't big on chinese so I figured it was a good night to go, and we had actually gone just a couple weeks back, and Emmy seemed to like it.  She didn't really eat of course, except she loves those little crunchy strips they bring you, but she liked the place so she was pretty well behaved and didn't ask to leave every second. 

I loved my dinner and it was so much food I got another snack plus two lunches out of it.  After dinner, we ran around getting stuff for the royal wedding.  It may have been a bad idea to go out that night, as we didn't get home and get her to bed until after 10:30 and then she had to get up early the next day.  But we had a fun night out together.  Saturday morning after the wedding she and I made donughts.  She had fun decorating them and even more fun eating them.  I took a short nap after that, and then the three of us went to the library, they brought in a small petting farm for a couple hours.  There were bunnies, an alpaca, some lambs, a calf, a small pony, some baby goats and a big goat.  I was shocked that she actually fed the goat, and she rode the pony....it was just a short ride in a smallish circle but she enjoyed it.  She's gotten so much more shy and timid over the last year or two.  She rode ponies twice at this park last summer, but this time as we stood in line she'd go back and forth between I don't want to ride it, and yes I do want to ride it, and back to no I don't want to ride it.  I said well we didn't wait in line all this time, just to get out of line and then have you scream and cry because you do in fact want to ride the pony.

So she wanted me to pick her up to put her on, and I did walk somewhat beside the pony as she went, but otherwise, she did really well.  I was surprised.  Then she wanted to go inside and play for a little bit.  I always forget how amazing our library is.  They have a really nice kids area with lots of toys.  So she played for a bit while I picked out some books to check out.  We need to go there more often, she has so much fun playing with the different toys (which do not make a mess in my living room) and I've actually really looked forward to bedtime stories tonight and last night since we had new books to read.  I get so tired of reading the same books over and over and over.  And it's not due to a lack of books, she's got tons of books, we've just read them all, plus some...and then some more.  I love my paycheck now, but somedays I really miss just working 10 hours a week.  Ten hours was a cake walk, it was literally just two hours a day and on occasion when I got busy with some time and worked more, I got to have an extra entire day off. 

I really miss having more time to spend with Em....we used to go out in the middle of the day, for walks, or to the mall or library, we'd go out to lunch.  But now I feel like I work so much and I'm just running here and there and busy all the time.  But on Tuesdays and Thursdays I typically do not start working until she goes down for quiet time at 3pm, so we really should start going places more on those days, even if it's just the library or the park.  I will say, she has been trying lately, but she is very low maintenance.  A trip to the park, some play time in the back yard, a walk around the neighborhood or an hour playing with slime and you'd think you just gave her the world....she's pretty easy to please.

Except when it comes to food.  But I just ordered these fun little things that might help make meal times easier.  I got some fun cookie cutters for stuff like fruit and veggies and even lunchmeat and cheese.  I also got some colorful toothpicks with hearts and stars and stuff on them to stick in grapes and cheese, and I plan on serving some of her food in cup cake papers....maybe if I make lunches and dinners fun and cute, she'll be more apt to eat it.

I love to write down the funny things she says so I will remember them later.  Today she had a speck of dirt on her arm so I tried licking my thumb and wiped it off.  She hates when I try to clean her with my saliva.  She jerked her arm back and says mommy, it's not going to come off just by licking it, that's gross!   Haha, says the girl who acts like she's just going to kiss you, but licks your tounge instead.  Yeeeeuck!