Fairy Crowns for Catherine

Catherine was having a bit of a rough spot yesterday. She was trying to dress up her animals and the darned clothes just wouldn't cooperate! It was quickly becoming meltdown time. I spent a few moments helping her get the stubborn fairy dresses on her cats, but I could see that a change of pace was still needed in order to help her transition, so I opened up the craft closet to see what we had to mess about with and she instantly perked up. From the uppermost shelf I pulled down a pile of wire decorations that we had left over from a kid's craft booth at a festival a couple of years ago and we spent quite a while making crowns for Catherine and all of her favorite stuffies. If Catherine could read this she'd be correcting me at the moment because they aren't just crowns, they're *fairy* crowns! They simply *must* be *fairy* crowns because EVERYTHING is fairy related at our house right now. lol

Thanks to an RPG called Faery's Tale that several of the kids in our homeschool group have been playing, my kids have been fairy crazy for the last couple of months. We've had fairy movie marathons where we watched any movie we could think of with a fairy or fairies in it. (Labyrinth, Fairies, Fern Gulley, The Last Unicorn...) We've read several books, both old and new, about fairies and while looking for new ones at the library we found a cute little series called The Fairy Chronicles. It's about a group of young (mortal) girls who find out they have fairy powers and can use them to create change in the world. My 10 year old was elated to find that one of the characters is even homeschooled! (Not unschooled, but we'll take it.) I pulled out my old copies of Brian Froud's fairy book and other books that had been in storage until now nad got to share some of my favorite fairy stuff from when I was a kid with my kids. We've also been reading lots of fairy lore and myths, looking up information on "real" fairies and other little people, searching online for places around the world where people claim to have seen fairies and other such creatures, and more...all because of an RPG. Just one more example of delight driven learning in action!