Dueling Ariels

If you've been following Mommy With a Penis, you've heard about my daughter's closet of princess costumes, from tiaras to matching shoes. You've also heard that my son sometimes likes to dress in his sister's things. Well, to support both these themes I dug up this photo from last Halloween...

Sometimes we just have to face the fact that mermaids are huge. When I was a kid, long before the Disney film, I'm a little ashamed to admit that my favorite story was The Little Mermaid. (Didn't everyone have a Hans Christian Anderson anthology?) Granted in that version she was blond and not a plucky redhead, and I don't remember her having a moniker of any sort. She was just a mermaid looking for love: long suffering, pretty and silent. And she had a brassiere made of seashells. What future gay boy wouldn't be enamored.

Michael took Maxie to Target to find her Halloween costume and without qualm she chose Ariel. I was amazed at how quickly she made her choice, because left to her druthers my daughter can hem and haw and still not have settled on an outfit by lunch. But Fate wasn't quite done with us. A day later, our little neighbor brought her old Ariel costume for Maxie to wear. So now we had two mermaids and only one child to dress. Being fast on my feet, I quickly hid the Target costume, price tag still attached, figuring I'd return it later, pocket the cash and put it in my dermabrasion fund. Little did I know that I would almost have mutiny on my hands.

A couple of days after acquiring the mermaids, both my daughter and my son wanted to wear the hand-me-down Ariel costume. I tried to set a rule, "Maxie will wear the costume for five minutes, and then it will be Sebastian's turn," but that new agey parenting technique was met with fury by both parties. I tried to make the other princess dresses seem appealing: beautiful Sleeping Beauty, glam Princess Barbie, sparkly Iridessa (Tinkerbell's sistah fairy friend), but I could sense both of them were about to loose it. It was Ariel or nothing. I weighed my options; all out meltdown or happy siblings. I'll be the first to admit they may have played me but I dug out the Target costume anyway. And total peace was restored.

It should be noted that while Sebastian loved dressing up as Ariel, he decided against transvestism and went trick or treating as a werewolf...his decision.

Dermabrasion, however, is still on hold.