At a recent Buckingham Palace garden party, the Crown Princess mingled with specially invited guests, including Aldis Grandison and her daughter Jay Cee La Bouche. Sky News published a video of her saying, "I'm not good at jokes. She added that contractually, her husband Prince William is "very good" at jokes, prompting Grandison to comment, "You're tougher than me."

Kate's response? She laughed and replied, "I am definitely not stricter! How can you say that?

(How could you not know? Just in case.) William and Kate are the parents of Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis, and according to People, Kate thanked them for bringing a sense of normalcy to their three children's very unusual lives. Those kids are living quite happily," a palace insider recently told the magazine. 'A lot of that is due to the stability and normalcy that Kate brings. William loves it."

One insider said of Kate, "Coming from a different background, she understands the importance of having family time. She didn't grow up in an aristocratic environment where she only saw her children for a short time each day."

William and Kate regularly drop the children off at school and make sure at least one of them is home when they return, making pizza with the children or playing outside. This is a far cry from the old pattern of royal parenting, in which royal parents often relied on nannies to get the job done; according to People magazine, when then-Prince Charles and his sister Princess Anne were young, they could only see Queen Elizabeth twice a day during their twice-daily scheduled "meetings. After the birth of younger siblings Prince Andrew and Prince Edward in the 1960s (Prince Charles was born in 1948 and Princess Anne in 1950), "it was a world dominated by nannies," according to royal biographer Ingrid Sward.

Conversely, William and Kate were allowed by their late Majesties and Prince Charles to devote themselves to their young family rather than their royal duties. Says a friend of the family, "Generations of royal families have never had the opportunity to get those foundations right." 'But they have done so.'