baby girl's first princess costume

So, for the record, now that I have a daughter, I will confess that I'm not a huge fan of the princess craze (girly stuff and dolls and all that I'm fine with). I won't forbid it or anything but I certainly won't encourage it until she's old enough to express an opinion on the matter and request princessy stuff herself. And this is no double-standard. We didn't overtly encourage stereotypically boyish things for Elias (or forbid them) and in fact welcomed the times when he picked out a Dora the Explorer potty training seat, for example, just as we encouraged his love of all things with wheels. And it doesn't bother me when people now tell me what a "boy's boy" he is. He is who he is, whether that's stereotypically boyish or not, and we look forward to seeing who Daphne grows up to be as well. That said, it turns out we have already embraced the princess culture with our Halloween costumes this year (but c'mon, if you're gonna go as a princess, what better princess to be, amirite?).

Yep, Daphne was Princess Leia to Elias's Luke Skywalker:

He's posing there with his classmate and good buddy, Kingston, after their Halloween parade at school.

I can't remember the exact context but Elias asked me what the word crush meant recently and when I asked him after explaining if there was anyone at school he had a crush on he at first replied everyone, that he had a crush on everyone at his school, and then clarified to explain that most of all he had a crush on Kingston. Aw.

We kept Halloween shenanigans to a delightful minimum this year and I have no regrets. Well, almost no regrets. We never got a really good picture of both Daphne and Elias together in their costumes, brandishing light saber to boot. But Elias is again talking about a Star Wars themed birthday party next year so perhaps we'll have another chance - their costumes are certainly big enough!

And while we went to our usual pumpkin patch early in the month, we never got around to carving the one big pumpkin we brought home.

We did supplement with some other pumpkins we picked up at Trader Joe's and decorated the front porch with them, but Elias was a little bummed on Halloween day that we never got around to the carving part (even though he seems to enjoy very little about the actual process; Neal ends up being the one to do most of the scooping out of pumpkin innards and actual carving). As I have done with so much stuff over the past nine months, I kept saying "we'll do it next year" or "this will be more fun next year". Because carving pumpkins with a six-year-old and a 21 month old running around will be a piece of cake, right?

Anyway, aside from those minor regrets, it was nice to not overdo it. One pumpkin patch, one Halloween parade, one session of trick-or-treating in costume. For the latter, Elias got to walk around a few blocks in our neighborhood with his daycare days best buddy Hazel who moved back to town about a month ago. Yipee!

Stay tuned for Daphne's 9 month update later this week...