I can't believe it. How could five years have possibly passed since my gorgeous daughters with my still devilishly handsome husband came into the world. Admittedly it wasn't the best of circumstances, that ahd been quite callously taken out of our hands by my former boyfriend who was now back in America and in solitary confinement for a crime I've chosen not to think of or know the details about because, as a mother, it's really too close to home. But the time now is rapidly approaching their fifth birthday and Beneidct and I have just the surprise in mind.
The one thing that will make their July 1st birthday party that much easier is that Danica and Kayleigh have a shared love of anything to do with the Disney Princesses, with Danica seeming to favor Ariel, no surprise there as she too is a right little swimmer, while Kayleigh seems to be on the side of the independent Princess Belle so with just the right amount of items of each of the Princesses as gifts and party supplies, it should be a pretty easy day that is being held at the new just out of town home of Tom Hiddleston.
Tom and Eliza unfortunately didn't work out but for the last two years he has been seeing this truly amazing, wonderful, talented lawyer by the name of Brittany Adamson, who is originally of Canadian nationality but has been living in London for the last eight years. They really are the perfect fit and even Tom's sister Emma says their mother Diana would have approved of it if she was still around, but as she has left this world for the next, to get involved with Brittany or not was a decision that Tom knew he had to make on his own.
As unlikely as it seemed, Tom and Brittany didn't want to take any chances on those peskier aerial photographers hanging around and getting unwarranted and completely unwanted pics of the day so a massive tent with Cinderella's castle facing the sky was put up the day or two before while one table had Princess Ariel paraphenalia strewn across it and the other was filled with items to do with Princess Belle, and if I'm honest with myself, the fact that the girls no longer seem to have Benedict's ginger/auburn hair and are now closer to dark brown, Kayleigh almost resembles Belle.
The morning of the party, Benedict and I wouldn't have been able to keep either of them in bed beyond 9am even if we were to make some kind of attempt and although we hadn't got the chance to see it the day before, Tom said when we arrived that Brittany had spent most of the evening until he coaxed her into their bedroom at 11pm finding black-and-white pics of all the Disney Princesses and printing them out to give the fifteen other children we had been expecting something else to do should the Heavens decide to open up without warning.
We managed to get through the morning without any kind of interference from Mother Nature but at exactly 2pm the Heavens opened up and torrential rain threatened to literally flood the vast backyard. Tom, luckily, had the foresight to put a walkway between the tent and the house up so that everyone was able to make it back to the main building without the risk of ending up getting soaked through. The next two hours were spent watching every Disney Princess movie that had ever been made, including the original films where they had made their 'film debut appearance' to the audiences.
Danica and Kayleigh were never far apart that entire day, even when the movies were on they were sitting side-by side on the carpet in the lounge room near Ben's feet, which looked to be a so far permanent license for Tom to playfully tease his longtime friend over the fact that they were still both 'complete, total daddy's girls', but Benedict either honestly didn't mind Tom's good natured teasing or he ignored it completely because he'd waited so long to be a father and to be given two at the one time was something he could never have anticipated.
That night when we returned back to our home around 8pm, Danica and Kayleigh were out like lights as soon as their heads hit the pillows (they had their own rooms by now) which as a result gave Benedict and I a chance to sit together on the sofa in silence as we looked back on the day that had passed, knowing that the next big one would be their thirteenth on July 1 2030, and although there was another eight years to go before that came around, I could tell he was already thinking about how they'd be as teenagers.
What neither Ben or I knew however was that Danica had been honing her vocal skills with the soundtracks to each of the primary Disney movies from the late part of the 1980's to the mid-1990's (Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and Pocahontas among the too many others to count), at least not until her first grade teacher Ms Alexandra 'Alex' Johnson pointed it out to us by showing Benedict and I a tape she had made of rehearsals for the end of year event they were putting on, and even for a five-year-old, she was showing real talent.
Which left us with a bit of a dilemma. Do we pull her out of the school she was currently in to put her in a school specialising in the performing arts or do we keep her there with those she had come to call her friends, including her twin sister, and let her decide at a later date if it is something she wanted to really think of going after. We decided to leave her where she was for the time, never mentioning it to her so she was never anymore the wiser as to what we had been shown.
