There’s a storm brewing in our house and a fight upon us…and the conflict is being fueled by the marketing juggernaut that IS the Disney Princess collection.

I’ll preface this by saying that I’d vowed from the beginning to keep my home turf safe from junky mass-marketed toys; my oldest had an Elmo book, when she was little, and kissed Elmo in the book—but didn’t watch the show (or any tv, in my perfect mom days) until she was 2 1/2. And I don’t even think Elmo is bad. The toys in our house were wholesome award winners and played with lovingly, with small cartoon birds flying around our heads, gentle music surrounding us, and learning opportunities abounding. At least that is my recollection.

So then the Disney princesses arrived, and began a slow but all-consuming takeover, dressed for battle in (junky) dresses and 3 inch (if you measure to scale) high-heeled shoes. There is a bit of inevitability to this process, I suppose, when one is the parent of three girls, but here I’ll add that my husband is the main provider of princesses and their gear.The books arrived first with tales of love and marriage to the point that no one could mention a friend without saying “I’m going to marry [fill in name]”. No one in our house could date, or just be friends—it was all about marriage. With no understanding of the concept as they were marrying uncles, girlfriends, and in one case I believe a stuffed tiger. I hated the books and refused to read them, but they now seem the least of my problems.

The miniature little dolls were the next big problem—a, the children couldn’t dress them because their PARTS were too small, the DRESSES too tight-fitting, and children’s HANDS don’t work that way. So I was constantly dressing and undressing little rubber dolls and picking up shoes from here there and everywhere.The kids threw them aside, however, when the Barbie-sized princesses began their invasion—complete with full wardrobes, falling-off shoes, impossibly small accessories, and floozy hair. My dad summed it up in an email after Christmas; brand-new Aerial was missing, and I sent a note to my family asking if they’d seen her around in the wrappings, and his email came back “I saw the ho”. What he meant to say was “I saw the horse she came with,” but this was a clear case of the freudian slip and I think in fact the message was more correct than he knew.

And the horses, the HORSES. They turned my manly husband obsessive compulsive as he searched all over for a horse for each kid’s doll, paying Kmart something like $40 in shipping (maybe I exaggerate) to get us a Belle horse (‘because she’s really hard to find’) The horses, which provide no visible means of transportation as the dolls CAN’T SIT ON THEM WITHOUT FALLING OFF, do nothing but stand around covered in silver manes and jewels. That is they were covered in jewels until they began shedding them to remain stuck (possibly forever) to the kitchen floor.

What I remember at that age is loving Little House on the Prairie books and sure, I watched the show, too. But this wholesome activity did not involve 1000 plastic parts, high-heeled shoes, dresses that ripped if one looks at them wrong. And if Little House did have dolls, I’d venture to say they’d be modest. That is, I’d never expect Ma or Laura (doll-form) to be lying around flashing their lady-parts all over. My house is indecent with naked ladies since the kids can get the dresses off, but trying to put them on means stiff arms poked through torn holes in cheaply made gowns. Last night while watching the Biggest Loser I dressed 4 dolls because there’s only so much naked flesh a person can take.

The dolls provided a teachable moment, of sorts, the other day when the girls began lobbying for MORE princesses—they needed Jasmine, they claimed (who we found to be elusive even in the flesh on our visit to Disneyworld; a fellow 4-year old patron offered the opinion that she was dead, another byproduct of stories that inevitably involve killing and such, even if it is evil stepmothers). And they needed a prince, since only one is in our house. I’m not talking about my husband, who does remain the single male figure in this house of girls, but Snow White’s beau who came in a set and who flounces about in a manly tunic (my husband laid down the law that he stays dressed, less from a sense of modesty than from his cheaply made boots and cruddy pants that are impossible to get back on). “We need more boys” the girls claimed, for their princesses, but I pointed out that the lesson to be learned is that your girlfriends are who’s around to count on, and they didn’t need a man. I think the lesson perhaps was over their heads.

To sum up let me alleviate any lingering worry and report that the “ho” has been found; my obsessive husband launched a house-wide search that never turned her up (this from a person that loses his wallet, his shoes, anything not attached to him at a given moment) and we thought she was gone forever. But a game – a wholesome game, in fact, of “pretend we’re camping”, a game worthy of Little House – involved pulling out the sleeping bags they got for Christmas, and it turns out that Aerial, ho or no, had merely crawled in for a long winter’s nap. Even I found myself excited at her return. And ten minutes after she turned up, I picked her naked self off the floor.

The Washington Post recently ran an article talking about leisure time – as studied by an expert, and written by a working mom (I know, I know, all moms are working moms) who had no leisure time. In fact, in order to prove she had no leisure time she volunteered to be a part of a study on leisure time and it took her about a year to find the time to do the study.

Here is a link to the whole article.

I read the article, I read the comments, even read reaction by another blogger, Marissa Levin, who writes for the Examiner (here).

My thoughts come at a time when I’m trying to work on controlling my temper – in my continuous drive towards self-perfection (ha!) It’s actually because I know I yell to much, especially when my 6 year old mini-me runs around bellowing as well. It all got reinforced by my mom who wrote me a note to pull it together after I yelled at Christmas (this after YEARS AND YEARS of blaming Christmas conflict on my sister, who was absent this year – but who to be honest is the usual source of conflict. Just kidding).

So in this temper-control mode I know that I have to make sure I’m not working too much. Because that is when I get stressed and yell. Especially since my stated goal is to be around to spend time with my kids – and the article here raises an interesting point. It mentions that over the years we are not spending LESS time with our kids – in fact, we probably spend more. I know for me, I am constantly stopping what I’m doing to play Go Fish or Crazy Eights or watch an Annie show. My mom didn’t do this as much – we played on our own more (and could, out in the yard, unsupervised, without the marauding band of kidnappers that we fear are out there today). I told my twins today, in fact, the the benefit of having a twin sister was that they always had someone to play cards with and they looked at me blankly, then played half a game before one threw all the cards at the other.

Obviously a big part of the leisure time thing is choosing that time and also defining what is leisure time. If you’re “doing work” but on facebook for an hour (I would NEVER do that) is that work? Or if, just as an example, you were hypothetically my husband and at work emailing your friends for 2 or so hours about football, The Sports Guy, Jersey Shore, and then playing Mafia Wars on facebook – is that leisure time? Should it be counted as so?

All right, also, another thought I had (these are more “thoughts” on the article than a well-organized response) is I know, personally, I need to a, develop a hobby and then b, do the hobby. That would be qualified leisure time. But in the interim I’m fitting it in, and while sometimes that means extra stress, I know that I’m not able to sit restfully and watch television (I can’t watch Jersey Shore restfully or not restfully) without doing something…knitting, working on the computer, reading, something. So does that mean it’s not leisure time? To me, it is, and I’m still able to sort-of relax. Should I be dedicating time to doing nothing or only things I wish? Sure, I guess, but I feel lazy when I do that. I’m better busy; I guess the balance is “busy” vs “too busy” and that is a slippery slope.

Now that I’m working from home I have more time to spend improving my children’s lives (!) and the intervention, it seems, comes non-to-soon as my six year old has turned into a hoarder.

Have you seen those people on tv? Matt Lauer was talking to one a while ago on the Today show, and I watched  in disgust with my own (at the time) secret hoarder as she ate breakfast before heading to the bus – never guessing she was actually looking for tips!My mother and I went to her bedroom to help her “organize” – it was a disaster area. She likes to play games that include making little tableaus of dolls with blankets, etc all over her room so there is no floor space available; she likes all her books to be laid out in various piles all over her bed; on and on. So we tried to buy her some shelves and boxes (in fact, she got these from her grandma as a birthday gift and pointed out “This is NOT what people usually get as a gift”.)

We started going through her boxes and found the following (only the weirdest are listed):

1. A candy bar wrapper that she had saved for its glow-in-the-dark properties

2. A spice bottle filled with water

3. The end of a loaf of french bread (disgusting) that we threw away, in the sink, and which she then saw had sort of reconstituted with the addition of water and which she then WANTED BACK

4. Three random plastic toys that belonged to a set she might someday get, she thought (she won’t)

5. Two popped balloons

6. Ripped wrapping paper from a birthday gift that she was going to re-use

7. A bunch of old newspapers – it turns out that these were comics given to her by Daddy when she was in the hospital over the summer, so she wanted to save them.The last bit of reasoning is sort of cute and in fact, she had REASONS for everything she saved. But put together as a collection filling her room (and arguably attracting rodents) the whole mess was gross and a bit scary.

She wants to hold on to things that are important or have some meaning to her, but it’s everything. I know that sometimes I am the same way – saving each picture every kid draws, every single school assignment – but it so quickly becomes overwhelming that now I am rash, and throw things away the second they come through the door. In fact I got a special trash can behind my “main” kitchen trash can – it’s a two-can set in a pull-out drawer, and I think some people use the second for recycling but mine is kid stuff I throw away that I don’t want the Hoarder to pull back out of the trash. For the most part  she forgets what I throw out – though she did pitch a fit when she went back to find the previously mentioned ripped wrapping paper.

I think she wants to hold on to her childhood, all of it, and in many ways so do I. But not in the form of a moldy piece of old bread.

The title of this refers to my 2010 resolution. Devoted readers (I don’t even know if my mom’s on this list, I doubt it) may remember that I made a promise of trying to blog a bit more frequently, but based on the entirely cruddy ending of 2009 (which began and middled as cruddy too) I felt it was best to keep my mutterings to myself. I know that 2009 was very few people’s favorite year, but I think I ended up feeling even sorrier for myself by blabbering about how “2009 stinks, 2009 stinks”. It therefore became even more self-fulfilling (and stinky).

But here’s the problem: my kindergarterner, who is a mirror of myself, started walking around complaining about EVERY little thing, too. All the bad parts of school were discussed ad nauseum over and over. And I finally sat her down and said that she needed to STOP complaining about everything! Especially old grievances – she brought up the other night how I’d given away one of her birthday gifts (a Bratz doll that wasn’t allowed in our house) OVER a year ago. The doll was even replaced (not by me, by my husband) but she still was complaining – not because she was still mad, but because complaining was becoming her go-to!So I discussed staying positive and only talking about the good things and realized that of course it was advice I should be taking. I’m being tested as “for better, for worse” has also turned into “for lunch” as my husband job-hunts from home, and together our family develops cabin fever in record-setting cold.

But if the sunshine doesn’t start with me it won’t so I’m hoping my pollyanna ways will begin to rub off. At least I can write about it to hold myself accountable!