As we were parking, she exclaimed, "This Target has a princess aisle! Mommy, can we go to the princess aisle???" I started trying to think of reasons we couldn't go to the princess aisle, and wondered if "no because Mommy would rather stick rusty nails in her eyeballs than go look at all that stupid pink crap again" would suffice. I briefly wondered how it was that she remembered that this particular Target has a princess aisle, and then remembered that EVERY STORE has a princess aisle. Princess stuff is ubiquitous. How I missed her Star Wars days, when she liked to dress up as Darth Vader or pretend she was a jedi knight.
As we went past the little girls' dresses, her eyes were immediately drawn to the white frilly Easter dresses. "Oooooh, Mommy, can we buy that dress?" I'm nervous for her to have a credit card, and petrified of the day she discovers internet shopping. I'm also wondering how she suddenly became so interested in shopping, and looking at dresses, and wanting to buy stuff. Then I remembered that I had just made her spend 10 minutes in the purse aisle because Mommy needed to buy a new purse. Maybe I should just accept that it's one of the ingrained things on the X chromosome.
She was being her usual chatty self, but paused for a few minutes to observe a small boy coming from the opposite direction. He wasn't really that small. He actually was pretty big, slightly bigger than Allison in fact, and he was being chatty too. Except that he had a specific motive- his mouth was messy with some sort of dark food residue, and he was saying, "Ma...ca..." His mother briefly turned from the well-displayed items in the aisle to say, "You want more candy?" The kid nodded and thrust his grubby little paws out for more candy.
Their cart wheeled closer until Allison and the other child were even. They stared at each other in that way that little kids do, checking each other out, ready to be challenged or to be best friends. The kid started grunting again, "Ma...ma..." and pointed non-specifically. Allison interpreted this as a challenge, and informed him,"No, that's not your mommy. That's MY mommy." Then the kid changed his tactic. Obviously he was not impressing this sophisticated little girl. "Tu...tu!" Allison replied, "Yes, I am two. That's correct." I started laughing. His mom looked up and started laughing too, and then said,"What did she say?" I told her, and this time she laughed more meaningfully, but suddenly became serious. "He just turned two." I interrupted before she had to ask, and told her that Allison would be 3 in a few months. I didn't want her to feel bad.
It reminds me of a time that we were on a plane when Michael had just turned 2. Both kids have always been good travellers, and this trip was no exception. With only one kid at the time, we had extra free hands, and were in the habit of bringing his carseat on the plane and strapping it in. It worked great; the theory was that they were used to being strapped into their carseats and therefore did not beg to be let out of the seat so much. Michael could generally be entertained with the in-flight safety manual, and he was holding this up as if he were reading the paper. In the row in front of us was a slightly younger child, who was quite loud and basically bouncing off the walls. He was looking over the seat and trying to climb into our row. Michael noticed the ruckus, and peered over the top of his safety manual, shook his head, and went back to his reading. He may as well have been smoking a pipe, and wearing a robe and spectacles.
I suppose there are worse things than two-year-olds with ostentatious vocabularies and penchants for the in-flight reading material. I wheeled Allie off to the bedding aisle. I was hoping that the princess sheets and throw rugs would qualify as the "princess aisle" so I wouldn't have to schlepp all the way to the actual princess aisle. Maybe I could convince her that that was at the otherTarget...
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