Sunday, July 29, 2018

Finding fairies at a birthday party

Some moons ago, my wife and I threw our daughter a fairy-themed fifth birthday party. 

The invite had eight clumsy lines of verse. The first four:

Our little girl is turning five
Or fünf as Germans say [my wife is German]
And creatures even littler
Will be coming out to play

Our little girl was not especially into fairies, but I was; the year before, I'd begun work on the book that would (a decade later) be Fairy Spell: How Two Girls Convinced the World That Fairies Are Real.



The birthday festivities took place at a park down the street from where we lived. One of the activities we ran (and the highlight for me): find fairies. 

Like Elsie in Fairy Spell (and in real life), I prepared paper fairies. In fact, I used hers. She drew them; I merely printed them out. Before the kids arrived, I hid the fairies in the lightly wooded area near the field where we'd serve cupcakes. They were numbered so I'd have a quick way to know if the kids found them all.




The last four lines from the invite:



The book is dedicated to her.

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