What’s the deal with Hannah Montana? Is she still popular? Isn’t it all iCarly and Justin Beiber now? Not being the parent of a tween girl, it’s sometimes hard to keep up with the trends. Ruby, being almost four, is exempt from most of the crazes that go on, although she has tweenish cousins who are always cluing us in on the latest fads. But somewhere along the line we received a Hannah Montana guitar, and a Hannah Montana doll, known in our house as “Hamm Intanma.”
The guitar plays about 20 seconds each of three Hannah Montana songs, which Ruby has memorized and sings repeatedly. She likes to run around the house pretending to play it and singing boisterously. We got the guitar first, and it was easy to ignore the tweeny connotations of it, because it was just a guitar that played songs. It could have been anyone singing the songs and she would have loved it, so I told myself that we were not on our way to liking older girl type stuff. She could stay a baby awhile longer, as far as I was concerned.
Then we got the doll. Hamm Intanma is basically a Barbie doll, but made to look like Hannah Montana. Ruby loves her of course, even though she seems incapable of correctly pronouncing her name. On the other hand, that is fine with me too, because I don’t want Ruby to like Hannah Montana yet, but I’m ok with Hamm Intanma. For a while that was Ruby’s only Barbie-type doll, but as of Christmas, Hamm Intanma is best friends with Rapunzel.
I know that I can’t stop Ruby from growing up, and soon she will start liking all sorts of things that completely horrify me. I know that Hannah Montana is mostly harmless in the grand scheme of things, but somehow she stands as a symbol to me, of where Ruby is headed and how fast she is going there. Is it so much to ask that Ruby stay almost 4 forever and just live at home and be my best friend? I guess it is, and that’s not really what I want anyway, but as each new phase begins, there is some sadness in the passing of the old. At least we’ll always have Hamm Intanma.