Vacation 2007 - The Princesses

Well, we're back from a week in Southern California where Fiona visited Disneyland, toured the San Diego Zoo, and went along with her grandparents while they shopped at Macy's for a new bed frame (I'm guessing the last one wasn't the highlight of the trip). If I try to blog about it all in a single post it'll either turn into one of those 5,000 word posts that nobody in his or her right mind reads all the way through, orI'll just never get it done. So we'll just do a series of posts and see how far we get.

Our first big event at Disneyland was to visit Ariel's Grotto for the princess luncheon. This is also known as "Little Girl Heaven." The place was swarming with girls five and under, most of them in costume. As one girl walked by wearing an Ariel (a.k.a. the Little Mermaid) dress, we watched Fiona watch her and could practically read her thought: "why don't I have one of those?" If you look at the photo at the top of this post, you'll notice that she did eventually wind up with one of those... her very own Aurora (a.k.a. Sleeping Beauty) to take home. Ah, parents are such suckers.

It's actually amazing to me that Disney took as many years as it did to cash in on the whole princess bonanza. It's everywhere now; any time you see a "cast member" at Disneyland addressing a little girl, it's always as "princess."

On the list of blog posts I always meant to get to and never did, Peggy Orenstein wrote a piece in the NY Times Magazine last December complaining about her three year-old's obsession with all things princess. What I found more intriguing than the actual article were the letters to the magazine after the article was published. Basically, you wound up with half the letters saying something like "as the father of an 18-month old girl, I dread the day that my baby discovers priness culture," while the other half were along the lines of "now that my seven year-old has discovered the Bratz girls, I miss the princess days desperately."

When Fiona was 18 months old herself, I dreaded princess culture, too. As a recent new parent, I can tell you that it is indeed possible to avoid exposing your child to Barney, but there's no earthly way to keep your girl from discovering princesses. But what you discover once your girl reaches princess age is that there really isn't anything to worry about. Yes, she wears a ton of pink, and yes, when we were in the store picking out a blanket for naptime at preschool there was no contest between the one with a picture of Disney princesses vs. anything else, but these princesses aren't waiting in towers for a man to come and save them. They're tough, they have adventures, and Fiona runs around and climbs all over furniture just as much as any boy playing Spiderman.

Anyway, back to the lunch. The first thing the little girls do is file downstairs to meet Ariel at her grotto for a picture. Then it's off to lunch, where the girls get paper crowns to wear. During and after lunch, the other princesses come out to meet each girl, sign an autograph (Fiona has a brand new pink princess autograph book) and pose for pictures. She got to meet Belle (from Beauty and the Beast), Aurora (her favorite princess these days, mainly because of the pink), Cinderella (from, um, Cinderella) and Snow White (who was the best of all the princesses when it came to interacting with the little kids, as she asked Fiona about her favorite color and how old she was, as opposed to whether or not she'd seen her movie).

And once lunch was over, Fiona quickly made another princess friend:

By the way, I was relieved to see the other girl in this picture a couple of hours later on the bumper cars and her parents had persuaded her to remove the Belle costume.

OK, that was already more words than I intended. More to come... And don't forget that clicking on any photo brings up a larger copy.