The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s daughter has just turned three years old.
On Tuesday 4 June, Princess Lilibet Diana may have officially turned three, but her parents, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle got a jump start on the celebrations and had a party at their home in Montecito, California over the weekend, according to People.
The outlet reported that those in attendance included both family members and the toddler’s friends. This is the second time Harry and Meghan, who also share five-year-old Prince Archie, have celebrated Lilibet’s birthday in the US instead of the UK.
At the time of writing, no members of the royal family have wished Lilibet a happy birthday.
The young princess was originally named after Harry’s grandmother, the late Queen Elizabeth II, who died in 2022. Lilibet was the late queen’s nickname, while the two gave her the middle name Diana after Harry and the Prince of Wales’ late mother. Her birth announcement, shared on the Archewell Foundation website, also explained that the couple would be using the nickname Lili.
Both Lilibet and Arthur were without royal titles upon birth because they were the great-grandchildren of the monarch at the time. Due to King Charles ascension to the throne, they then became the grandchildren of the monarch which allows for titles according to King George V’s Letters Patent in 1917 that reads: “… the grandchildren of the sons of any such sovereign in the direct male line (save only the eldest living son of the eldest son of the Prince of Wales) shall have and enjoy in all occasions the style and title enjoyed by the children of dukes of these our realms.”
Recently, Meghan and Harry went on a three-day tour in Nigeria to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Invictus Games. During their tour, Meghan couldn’t stop sharing some information about her second child.
The couple was at a school in the capital city of Abuja, where they were able to watch the children at a school showcase their talents, with the students putting on a dance and showing them the robots they built in a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) class.
Meghan had mentioned that “singing and dancing” is Lilibet’s “favorite class” because of “all the jumping around”.
To connect with the children, Meghan decided to talk about her own daughter and a conversation she had with her. “Our daughter, Lili, she’s much, much tinier than you guys. She’s about to turn three. And a few weeks ago, she looked at me and she would just see the reflection in my eyes. And she [goes], ‘Mama, I see me in you,’” she said.
“Oh, now she was talking really literally. But I hung on to those words in a very different way. And I thought, yes, I do see me in you, and you see me in you.”
She added: “As I look around this room, I see myself in all of you as well.”
Harry went on to speak about mental health during his own speech. “If I say mental health, do you know what it means?” he began, while asking the students and staff members to raise their hands.
“In some cases around the world, in more than you would believe, there is a stigma when it comes to mental health. Too many people don’t want to talk about it because it’s invisible. It’s something in our minds that we can’t see. It’s not like a broken leg, it’s not like a broken wrist.”
