A Lot To Live Up To

So this might be kind of a funny thing to come out of blog-hiding for, but I wanted to document it somewhere and this seems like a pretty good place to do so.

We have a 3 year old girl. A perfect, sweet, beautiful, wonderful little three year old girl. She is starting to get into all things princess - she likes fancy dresses, tiaras, jewels, necklaces, etc. She got a box of toy jewelry from someone for Christmas and it came with a necklace. The necklace have become her jewels and she slept with them on for several nights in a row even though I don't imagine they were very comfortable to sleep with.

She also loves Cinderella. I was a little surprised that Cinderella has become her preferred princess over the likes of Anna, Elsa, Rapunzel, and the others just because I think the movie is kind of slow, but she loves it. Amy took her to see the live action Cinderella when it came out earlier this year and I think that left an impression on her. In fact, she asked the other night if we could go watch Cinderella on the place that has the really big TV. I love those little descriptions.

For Christmas she also happened to get a Cinderella-like dress. It is light blue, with white and has lace. It's pretty cute, actually. I think it was yesterday that she had her dress on and kept dancing around with Amy, then would run away and Amy would yell after her, "wait! I don't even know your name!" Did I say she loves Cinderella? And that she's the cutest?

While she had the dress on she asked to look through our wedding book and Amy shared with her some memories of that day and talked with her about the different people in that book. She recognized grandmas and grandpas and is getting better at identifying who is mom's dad and mom and mine also.

It was while looking through the book that Amy said to Jane that she'll get married someday too and they had a nice little conversation about that, to which Jane replied, "maybe someday I can marry daddy too."

So there it is. For this little three year old, I am everything that it means to be a male role model. This is mostly because she doesn't have anyone else to really compare me against, but all the same, it still makes me feel a tremendous sense of responsibility. I really hope to live up to her ideal of what a husband should be.

For better or worse, I think we mostly end up recreating for our adult-selves the same relationships that we witnessed as children. Sometimes we live as a reaction against those relationships and people that we observed in our childhood, but I think there's always at least a subconscious pull back to them even when we are trying to escape. I just hope that whatever I model for Jane as a father and husband that it can be for the better and help her to aspire to great things.

I just love that little girl so much. It's maybe a bit silly, but I'm flattered that she feels that way about me.