Meghan Markle has attended every one of Prince Harry’s Invictus Games iterations since 2017—but what does Harry think about bringing their kids Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet someday?
To the proposition, Harry told Town & Country, “Absolutely,” adding that he would “love for them to experience the Invictus spirit firsthand one day.”
Harry founded the Invictus Games in 2014 as a multi-sport event for wounded, injured, and sick service personnel, both those still serving and veterans.
“Right now, they’re still young, but we already talk about the importance of resilience, community, and service—everything Invictus represents,” he said.
Courtesy of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle
On February 9, Harry revealed that he had spoken about landmines to 5-year-old Archie as a result of his work with the Games, showing him the iconic footage of his mother Princess Diana walking through a minefield in Angola in January 1997, a walk Harry would recreate in September 2019, just months after Archie was born.
Per The Telegraph, Harry showed Archie the footage of Diana to help him “understand [the] lasting impact of the weapons of war.”
“It’s hard, because kids don’t always ask the right questions, so you either shut it down right away—which I will never do—or you engage in the conversation and try to explain things,” he told Canadian television channel CTV.
“Archie was asking about landmines, so I was talking about how some of these guys were blown up,” Harry continued. “I think IEDs [improvised explosive devices] are probably a little much at this point, but I found myself talking to him about mines when he was five years old. Interestingly, it gave me a chance to talk about my mum, his grandma, which I didn’t even really consider, so that became the outcome of the story for him.”
Getty
Harry added that Archie “wanted to see videos and photographs of his Grandma Diana out doing her thing for landmines all those years ago. It produced a very interesting conversation between me and him, different to what I thought it would be.”
As the Games’ current competition in Vancouver and Whistler prepared to kick off, on February 7 Meghan revealed in an impromptu speech that Harry talks to their kids about the Invictus Games, describing “the big rush in the morning and getting ready for school and packing the lunchboxes and making breakfast, and my husband is in all of that with us,” she said, per People.
“And then he’ll be on his phone, and Archie will be like, ‘Papa, why are you on your phone?’ and he says, ‘Because it’s Invictus. I’m getting ready for Invictus.’”
“You are his family just as we are his family,” she continued. “And I hope you recognize how much of his heart he has poured into every single beat that has gotten all of you to this week, that’s going to be spectacular. I need you to know that, how much it means to him and how much each of you mean to him.”
Getty Images
Meghan attended the first half of the Vancouver and Whistler Invictus Games earlier this week before flying home to Archie and Lilibet on February 11. On February 14, as Meghan spent Valentine’s Day apart from Harry, she took to her Instagram to write, “Back home taking care of our babies and missing my Valentine, as he continues on at the Invictus Games, changing lives and reminding all of us the power of healing and resilience through these incredible veterans and their families.”
Alongside a black-and-white photo of the two of them kissing while enjoying a meal, she added, “Beyond proud of my husband and what he’s created.”
@meghan Instagram
Harry told Town & Country that returning to Canada this year following the 2017 Games in Toronto “feels like a full-circle moment. Canada has been so kind to us over the years, and to be back here for another Invictus Games eight years later—married, with two amazing kids—is awesome!”
Of those two amazing kids, Harry said in a CTV News special that aired February 13 called Prince Harry and the Canadian Heroes that “Having kids is amazing, but it is…it’s a journey every single day, every single week. They just grow and they change.”
He added of Archie and Lilibet, per The Mirror, “I love the questions that they ask and the experiences and the challenges that they give you. It’s great.”
