Princess Abby

Compromises.  Life is full of them.  You go to the grocery store, they don't have the large size of salsa, you compromise and get the small jar in the meantime.  We lived in a trailer 15 minutes outside of town with one vehicle, we compromise and move into a main level house suite where we can hear everything that the basement suite people are doing (and vice versa).  I want to eat chocolate, I also want to lose weight.  I compromise and eat one teeny-tiny-itty-bitty piece of chocolate that takes up all the rest of my calories for the week.  They are everywhere.

So I am willing to compromise with my children.  Or another way to look at it is to pick my battles.  My husband isn't so convinced on this pick and choose theory, but I figure that he isn't home every day having to deal with all of the warfare that I do.

Abby is a wonderful, wonderful girl.  The cuddliest thing since they invented teddy bears (hmmm, I wonder when that was?  Maybe I should investigate, might be interesting).  She won't give you kisses on the lips, only the cheeks, but she is known to spontaneously, without any kind of prodding or threatening, say that she loves you.  Melt my heart.  But she is also very VERY strong-willed.  If she doesn't want to do it, I don't think wild horses could make her.

So when she decides, almost every afternoon, that she is done wearing clothes for the day, I usually let her.  Yes, I let my child run naked through our house.  I will even admit that sometimes she has been nude when her friends came over.  Horrible, isn't it.  But it's summer and it's hot, and I really hate fighting issues.  Somedays I think that clothes are overrated, but don't worry!  I don't prance around in my birthday suit.  I just go for pjs.

But Abby recently has found one article of clothing that she is in love with, and I am just happy that she's wearing clothing for most of the day.  Almost every day for a week now she has been dressing up in one of her princess dress-up dresses.  It is supremely adorable seeing her waltz around the house with her regal attitude, almost looking down her nose at you.  She likes to have tea parties while she is a princess, and sometimes will even share the royalty with her sister.

I am extremely happy to see this happy, firstly because of the clothing issue, but also because until she started this last week, she would never dress up, except on the rare occasion that her friends were over to play and they started it first and she would follow along.  I would try to get her to play dress-up with me, but she would always refuse.  So this is showing that she's growing and changing. 

The only problem I have with it is that she only likes to wear the one dress.  We have a decent sized chest of dress-up clothes, but that one pink dress is all she wants to wear.  So once it gets dirty, which it has, it needs to be washed.  But I am notorious for taking clothes to the laundry room and then leaving them there for a few days if the load they're in isn't ready.  Also if they require special care, which this dress does.  Hand Wash Only.  Why on earth would they make dress-up clothes hand wash only?  Do they know what a hassle hand washing is for me?  I don't have a laundry tub, I have to wash them in my kitchen sink! 

Oh the trials!