Fairy Crazy

My daughter recently purchased with her birthday money a new Disney movie called "Tinkerbell". It's a movie about Tinkerbell from the Peter Pan storyline. It's actually a delightful little story about the difficulties of trying to fit in, and about using the talents you have to do good. I really quite enjoyed it.

My seven-year-old daughter, however, not only enjoys it, but is completely convinced that fairies are real. The other day I was talking with her about how fun it would be for her to catch a fairy so she could use the pixie dust to fly to school. I thought she was pretending that they were real, but she really isn't! She honestly believes that they are real, and has been chattering non-stop about how she wants to capture one. She has been putting shoe boxes with their lids propped up all over the house and yard so that if a fairy goes into one, it will knock the lid closed while it's inside and get trapped. She believes that she sees them at her window at night flittering around outside her window, glowing in the darkness.

To be honest, it's really quite cute. I'm a little concerned, though, because she's seven and I don't think it's quite normal to be gathered into a fairy tale this way. She's always had an overactive imagination, however, so I'm not totally surprised. If it wasn't so adorable, I'd be upset by it. In the last few days, I haven't been able to bring myself to crush her enthusiasm on the topic, and have carefully steered her older brother from giving her too much grief. (Too be perfectly honest, I'm a little concerned that actively dispelling this particular bit of fantasy at her age might shatter other not-truisms in her life with which I'd like her to pass through the holidays intact. *wink*)

I did tease her a little tonight that if she does catch a fairy, I'm going to shake all the pixie dust out of it and sell it on ebay. She was horrified by the thought, but I was insistent that people would pay millions for the chance to fly around and that there were major industrial applications to which the stuff could be applied. She was not amused in the least, though her older brother got a kick out of my line of reasoning.

In any case, I think we'll let her come down from this one on her own. Her traps, no doubt, will remain empty (hopefully she doesn't catch a mouse or something ...) and I'm sure rationality will eventually settle in. In the meantime, I don't see any reason to deprive her of the happiness she's deriving from this flight of fancy.

Kids can be so adorable.