About a week ago, Amy started wistfully staring off into space and wondering, “Mummy, are fairies real do you think? If they are, they’ll probably leave me some chocolate”. So began a somewhat long and involved process of Amy leaving out nightly letters (dictated to me), pictures, piles of glitter, bits of jewelry etc., for the fairies to find.

To start with, I was pretty sure she was just hopping on the fairy gravy train in the hope I’d try to convince her they were real by leaving her treats. Now, before anyone accuses me of bah-humbuggedness, this is the girl who got up on Christmas morning when I was happily squawking about Santa having come overnight, and said “oh, Mummy, Santa isn’t ACTUALLY real, you didn’t really believe that, did you?” as she rolled her 3.5 year old eyes at me. This is what I’m dealing with.  She might as well drink unicorn blood for breakfast. But after a week of fairy pen-pal action, she seemed to actually be quite into it, and genuinely bummed on the mornings when the fairies had been out of town the night before so hadn’t left her a letter (er, those would be the nights I forgot about fairy notes and had to invent a fictitious business trip for the fairies by way of excuse).

Noticing how eager Amy was to jump at the fairies’ requests for drawing pictures of rainbows/her family/butterflies etc, I thought I’d branch out and get these fairies into educating my preschooler. Amy is generally hesitant to get excited about my gentle coercion to practice writing (because work), and she completely got the shits with me the other day for subtly suggesting we could try to get her “Y” looking more like an actual Y, and less like a demented pitchfork. I was sure the fairies would get a much better reception for handwriting requests as she probably wouldn’t realise it was a work thing, because FAIRIES ARE WAY MORE FUN THAN MUMS ARE.

So last night, the fairies wrote:

“Dear Amy. Thank you for your beautiful drawing! We love all the colours you used on your flowers. We’d love to see if you could write the word ‘Fairy’, do you think you could try doing that for us? Love from the Kingsland Fairies”

Amy has responded accordingly. Suck it, fairies. You’re no more fun than a mother is.