Another great post from Melissa. I don’t know how she does it.

My daughter’s favorite song is “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke. And Macklemore & Lewis “Thrift Store” and “Can’t Hold Us” are close behind. She’s two. Epic. Parenting. Fail.

I have a lot of parenting fails throughout a day. The amount of TV we watch. That I will give her a cookies as a snack. That she knows how to shoot the Nerf gun with amazing accuracy (my poor dog). Sometimes, we don’t even make it out of pajamas until after her nap. At 3pm. And only because my husband is coming home and he will not be pleased. That she can use the camera on my phone without ever unlocking it. The documentation of her life should be a coffee table book.

She has some awesome moments, too. When she and her brother hug and snuggle and they read stories together. When she squeals with delight about going to the library. We won’t discuss the behavior when she’s there. How patient she is as we go grocery shopping. That she is learning her letters already and will point out E’s and O’s everywhere. When she burps or farts, which she does amazingly well, she always giggles and says, “‘Cuse me!”

I worried about having a girl. I always thought I’d have a baby girl because I came from a family of all girls, and when instead, I first had a boy, and then I couldn’t imagine life any other way. We spent our days running around outside, he and his father wrestled and my life became filled with trucks, tools and trains. He started school and I found out what I’d been missing: dolls, babies, makeup, princesses and fairies. Ew. I cannot handle the cuteness of it all. I’m not a particularly girly-girl.

And then the doctor told me “it” was a girl. Crap. I was not at all prepared for this mess of stuff. We made it to her first birthday before she received awful presents like a purse that says, “Let’s go SHOPPING” and it was Christmas at 18 months before she got her makeup table. She is a girly-girl. She knows innately how to put on makeup, hold her play phone on her shoulder with her ear while holding her purse, and takes care of more babies than I care to admit we own. I swear I did not teach her these things, it’s just who she is. We are rough and tough with her, we run around and wrestle, but I still feel like she was born with glitter in her veins.

She just recently celebrated her 2nd birthday and I finally caved and bought her a princess dress up costume. Crown and all. She was so stinkin’ cute. There was really no denying it. I put it on and watched as she ran away to get the makeup table and thought, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join em.” I got my coffee ready and came to watch her be a girly-girl. And there was my princess sitting on the floor trying to “fix” her makeup table. Yes, she had flipped it over, gotten the Handy Mandy toolbox, and was beating the snot out of it to “fix it”. Parenting win. She can be a girly-girl, she can be a tough girl but no matter what she’ll always be my princess. It just took a little glitter and a hammer to show me.