Once Upon a Germ

We've been holed up inside for a few days, partly because it's darn cold out there, partly because the girls have been playing so well together, and partly because, with 11 days to go until we head to Disney, I'm entering the phase of winter I like to call Completely Wackadoo Paranoid About Getting Sick. Let's not forget the winter of 2007, when one person or another in our family was sick for about six weeks straight. Let's not forget how, without fail, someone in our family pukes in the 24 hours before we get on an airplane to Florida every February. Any time anyone mentions a stomachache (Jemma, yesterday) or wakes up coughing a croupy cough in the middle of the night (Annie, Saturday), my heart lurches. Please, no, I think.

I'm crazy, and I know it, but the crazy can't be stopped. So we're here, cooking, playing baby, playing dog, doing puzzles, playing school, painting, drawing, coloring, dancing, and watching YouTube videos of Disney parades past. The girls oooh and aaah over every sighting of a princess, and though I've written before about my reluctance to buy in to the princess mania, we aren't really even trying to fight it at this point. In fact, I've now spent hours and hours and HOURS on the Disney website, hounding friends and neighbors and random parents in the school pick-up line, researching, planning, booking this trip. And I have gone so far as to book things called Princess Storybook Dining at Akershus Royal Banquet Hall for lunch and Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique so the girls can have their hair done and nails painted right in the Cinderella castle in the Magic Kingdom while wearing the dress-up dress we've brought along.

It's all so incredibly cheesy, so commercialized, so predictably, woefully expensive . . . and yet, watching those YouTube videos last night, Jemma on my lap and Annie on Jason's, all I felt was anticipation. I think it's going to be like Halloween and their birthday and the 4th of July and Christmas morning, all rolled into one, for a solid week. And while I'm sure there will be snafus and meltdowns and moments of Get Me Out Of Here, right now I'm going All In on the Disney Princess Thing. Because one of the best parts of being a parent is watching your child's dreams come true, and that's what this is going to be.

Now, nobody get sick.