ever after

I hope I didn't come down to hard on my kids in the last post. Yesterday was a really crummy day - and in my defense they have been somewhat challenging lately.

That being said, I have a cute story!

Tonight I decided that I was going to forgo dishes and bathing the kids and instead watch a movie with them. My choice? Ever After. Ever seen it? It's awesome. Definitely one of my favorite movies.

In this Cinderella story, Danielle lives at the mercy of her wicked stepmother and stepsisters after her father dies. She is lowered to the rank of servant. At the beginning of the movie, she disguises herself as a courtier so she can save a fellow servant from being sent to the Americas to work off the debt of the wicked stepmother. In doing so, she catches the eye of Prince Henry. He bumps into her a couple of times in the next couple of days and then actively seeks her out. Of course she lets him believe that she is of noble blood.

Cute things happen, their romance blossoms, it's all very sweet.

Then the stepmother finds out and locks her in a room. She manages to escape and shows up at the royal ball all decked out in her dead mother's beautiful dress, complete with wings, sparkles and glitter.

The step mother rats her out, the prince yells at her and she flees the courtyard sobbing and heartbroken.


It's one of the sadder moments of the movie - where you hope the prince will follow his heart and not societies rules and scoop her up and tell her that it doesn't matter that she came from mucking stalls. Not so. The prince acts as you would expect. The movie really wouldn't be the same without some conflict, after all.

Then I hear a "sniff".

I look down. You should have seen Jordan's face. She loves princesses. She loves the parts where Danielle gets all dressed up and looks pretty and the prince is obviously smitten.

I asked her if she was okay. She bursts into tears. I pause the movie. Seriously, there were tears and sobs and rubbings of the eyes. "It's okay Jordan," I tell her. "I thought they were gonna be happy!" she cries. She was quite heartbroken. I assure her that everything is going to work out. She was quite skeptical.

In the end everything does work out, and she was happy and relieved, although a little miffed that the wedding wasn't shown. She likes weddings, if only because of the big white dress.

In the summer she's a tomboy, in the winter she's a princess. She'll forget all about princesses during the mud, sand and dirt months.

I know I should have felt badly about her reaction, but I must admit, I was just a tiny bit delighted. I always said that even if I had ten kids (which I'm not) I didn't care if the numbers weren't even as long as I had one girl in the mix.

That being said - I love my boys to bits, wouldn't trade them. I don't care what this baby is either.

But someday, me and my one girl are going to go to chick flicks and talk about girl stuff and have the mother/daughter thing and it's going to be great.