The Grandparent Thread

We still have our original game and my Pretty Pretty Princesses are 28 and 29. They pulled it out a few years ago to play with their boyfriends, who looked very nice in the earrings and of course the crown for the winner.

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I had Mystery Date and Beatles Flip Your Wig. Both were exactly the same as Pretty Pretty Princess in that you collected 4 things (Boyfriend/dress/flowers/? or Guitar/wig/and 2 things I can’t remember) to win.

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I thought Barbie always had careers like “astronaut” and so forth.

Not when I was a kid! Of course, she was a kid when I was a kid.

The big irony here is that Barbie is simultaneously considered “very feminist” and “very anti-feminist”. I think the latter, though I encouraged my sons to play with Barbies to be a different kind of rebel about the sexism of toy marketing.

I also did not love the movie, which I thought was facile and leaned in to a lot of misogynistic tropes (including that you can be “too feminist” and that the weird-acting person correlates to looking weird). Mattel would love to think they are creating a girl-power icon, but the truth is pretty far from that.

I looked up Barbie’s resume, and it turns out her first job was fashion model in 1959, take that for what it’s worth. I also think that to say “this doll is an executive” has its own issues when the main thing you’re selling is fancy clothes (not, e.g. a set of transparencies for her to present at a meeting).

Apparently they tried to rectify that much later e.g. with “Spanish teacher Barbie”.

GD1 is 4, she loves getting dresses as the Princess in Frozen, and also as superheroes. She knows everyone of superheroes and their powers. She plays with dolls and also with trucks.
I buy her pretty dresses, and her parents buy her more neutral color clothes because that’s in now.

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I was friends with two families who had a girl and a boy the same ages as my kids. Poor Dennis had to put up with a lot of ‘creative costuming’ as our dress up box had mostly disney dresses. One Christmas I made them costumes and Dennis got a really cool (if I do say so myself) Knight costume with a cape out of fabric that looked like dragon scales and quilted knee and elbow protectors. Oh, and a chest protector. He was one happy knight.

He was ready to slay dragons and save the princesses (and they were all princesses).

Costumes were big in our lives.

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New grandson arrived this morning!

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Huge mazel tov!

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That was a fun blast from the past! I remembered almost all of the words to the jingle. Best friend who lived across the street had this one and we played it often in elementary school. :heart:

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The original Barbie came out in 1959. She was a teenage fashion model.

ETA: See someone else posted this. But, MUCH more recently, how can any of us forget the talking Barbie with a fixed number of sayings, one of which was “math is hard.”

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@jym626 : I didn’t know one was expected! How many total now?

4! Three boys, one girl. But we are traveling g and won’t be able to get out there until early April! :cry:

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I, my sister and my daughter are all feminists to the core- we all enjoyed playing with Barbies. We liked the clothes and the fact that she was an “adult” as opposed to our baby dolls. I don’t feel she was a big influence on us. GD is 2.5 and so far no Barbies. I expect she will play with them in time.

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As I recall, only my older sis had Barbies and sharing wasn’t something she did. She played with older friends her age (she’s 3 yrs older than me). I hung out with the other kids and neighbors and was an active tomboy. Dolls never held any lasting attraction for me.

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And, on a different topic, DGS 5 is now on day 5 of something that we now know is Influenza A, and he is still pretty sick! Since he was sitting on my lap on Saturday just before his first fever spiked, I am very glad we finally got our Flu and Covi vaccines a few weeks ago!

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:blue_heart: Congratulations, jym626, to you and your family! Grandchildren are such a blessing! :blue_heart:

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Congrats, @jym626 :blue_heart:
I found out today that the expected 4th grandbaby will be a boy.
D1 B, G
D2 B, B

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Congrats to the family!

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