Childhood Memory Monday: Princess Positions

Monday's post, since I was watching a True Blood marathon with a friend and didn't get around to this. I may have to move the TV post day, and I think I will dispense with the current events postings and instead do a favorite vegetarian meal. I am starting to feel the call to vegan a little bit more these days and would like to inspire myself in that area.

As I've mentioned previously, when we lived in Massachussetts we drove down to Florida every year for vacation. This served several purposes: to visit family (we had aunts and uncles on both sides who lived in various parts of the state), to take a vacation (we visited a wide variety of tourist attractions), and to look for a place to live.

My mother's health had begun to decline when we lived in Vermont, and among her ailments were arthritis and bursitis (both of which lead to painful joint inflammation). Her doctor suggested that living someplace warmer would be better for her. I'm a little unclear in retrospect why we had a three-year stopover in Massachussetts, where we lived in my grandfather's house (he was in a nursing home), but live there we did.

When we visited Florida, we drove - a process that took 3 days each way. My dad bought a guide to restaurants and hotels along the Interstate, and made fun math problems to help us determine how far we might drive in a day and, therefore, which hotels we should be looking at in our guidebooks - once this was determined my sister and I were happy to spend the entire day in an endless debate over amenities and whether the hotel name boded well for our stay (was an inn named Sleep luckier than a hotel named Quality or Comfort?). Despite the fact that, given our budget, all the hotels we actually stayed in were generically similar did not deter us from our mission to find the absolute best place. Nor did proximity to a variety of restaurants cease to be one of the primary deciders, when in fact my sister and I refused to eat anything except MacDonald's chicken nuggets with sweet and sour sauce despite our parents' begging: "doesn't a Whopper sound good? Arby's Roast Beef? A sitdown place? ANYTHING?!"

The hotel arrangements were quite cramped, since we'd get one hotel room with two queen-sized beds - my sister and I sleeping in one bed and my parents in the other. Now, while we did play together quite a bit (being close in age at about 2 years apart), 24 hours a day for a week and a half or two weeks at a time is quite a bit to ask of two children under 10. We professed to hate each other completely, and the awkward thing about the hotel was whether or not we would touch each other in our sleep, this being a fate worse than death. Enter Princess Positions.

Princess Positions were a variety of approved sleeping positions that genteel ladies of good breeding could assume in order to not disturb the sleep of their similarly genteel sleeping companions. I remember there being at least three "approved" Princess Positions (which meant my sister and I both agreed that the position drastically reduced the odds of nocturnal touching) though the most common was flat on your back with your legs together and your fingers intertwined on your chest.

Every night in the hotel, we'd change into pajamas, lay out our clothes for the next day, and lay in bed watching TV as a family for awhile before my parents turned out the lights, at which point either my sister or I would announce "Princess Positions!" and we'd immediately assume our chosen option for the night. After two weeks of this, we were always grateful to return to the relative spaciousness and freedom of our own twin beds!