Princess Ginny

Have you seen those baby clothes with bedazzled lettering and some word or phrase denoting royalty?  Well, I'm not a huge fan.  It seems like we're encouraging kids to be vain and bratty. (Don't get me started on the shorts with lettering on the rear that teenage girls wear...) Anyway, regardless of my haughty opinions, Ginny was wearing a pretty simple pink onesie the other day with the word "princess" in smallish silver lettering.  I felt awkward about it.  It didn't really seem to go with her personality all that well, and someone actually commented on it.  It made me stop and think.

Ginny is a baby. She hasn't really developed royal airs yet.  She likes to get messy.  She sits quietly and reads books.  Nothing really regal.  But then I remembered my walk into work today...

I work in an old mansion turned office building a couple miles from my house.   It's quite an impressive building with beautiful carved furniture, large windows, lovely oriental rugs, and a spiral stone staircase.  Rather castle-like.  However, it's quite the to-do getting inside the darn building with a baby in a carseat, a monster diaper bag, any stray toys, and lastly myself.  You have to go through several doors (that are far too narrow) no matter which way you choose to get in.  It's a pain.  Often some kind co-worker will take pity on me and open one or two of the six doors I have to go through to get to my office.  But while I'm sweating and puffing around trying to get in, Ginny is all smiles in her carseat.  And that's when I realized.  She does act rather regal at times.  She rides around in her carseat-turned-sedan chair with me as her lowly lackey.  I scuttle around opening doors for her--and does she thank me? No! She just smiles, or looks off in the distance.  We enter the building and she may smile meekly at co-workers, or occasionally she will deign to wave at someone from behind the sun shade in her sedan chair.  We enter the hall with the large stone staircase.  This entrance of peasants opening doors and smiling and waving wasn't triumphant enough for Princess Ginny.  As we ascend the stairs, Ginny yanks down on her toy bug that "sings" and it's music booms throughout the echoey hall and up the stairs.  A royal fanfare is added to Ginny's procession as if to proclaim to the whole office building: "Hear ye! Hear ye! Stop your work and bow to me, Princess Ginny!  Everyone gather 'round and wave and smile as I bounce towards my luxurious office in my sedan chair with this mere peasant, my mother."

Maybe the onesie speaks the truth.