embracing the magic

Time for a confession: I'm not so good with the magic. You know -- fairy rings, elven folk, castles, dragons. Fantasy is just outside of my comfort zone. And yet I strongly, deeply, believe that this sort of magic is an important -- nay, ESSENTIAL -- part of childhood.

For weeks, months (dare I say years?), I've been desiring to bring a bit more magic to my kids' lives. To give them the opportunity to explore and embrace all the possibilities. I never really had exposure to those sorts of things as a child, which I think is why I feel so uncomfortable with it now. My friend T was telling me that she took her son to a garden exhibit, and there were lots of those little stone animals about the garden. She commented to her son that an angry troll must have come out of the woods and turned them all to stone. A nearby mother was horrified that she said this, but when she told me, I was absolutely captivated! I would never have thought of something so creative and magical, right off the cuff like that. Which is probably why I'm so mesmerized by T -- she's just oozing with magical creativity. I guess I'm hoping it'll rub off on me!

In any case, I was discussing this with her recently, and she made me feel justly silly about putting so much thought into this. So finally I was shamed into actually DOING something about it instead of just TALKING about doing something about it. Here's my first step. I purchased a set of poem collections on The Flower Fairies, by Cicely Mary Barker, who is pretty much THE person for Fairies. It's a collection of 8 volumes, each with 20 or so poems and illustrations. I left the Flower Fairies of the Spring volume out on our nature table, along with the Fairy puppets (first photo) I found at our children's museum (and purchased months ago, which were just sitting in my closet waiting for me to get over my paralyzing inertia and give them to the kids).

It took a day or two for them to find it, but when they did, they were thrilled. J immediately read all the poems to Zoo Boy, and they discussed the illustrations in hushed whispers while I was in another room. (I purposely removed myself from the room so as not to allow any of my negative-fantasy-vibes to rub off on their initial attempts at exploring this realm.) They then played with the Fairy puppets, Zoo Boy running to find me and invite me into their delight at these things, asking pertinent questions like "why do fairies have wings?" and making generous comments like "we're both going to share these fairy things". Nobody asked where the items came from (I wouldn't have fessed up even if they had -- it's magic, after all!). But they embraced them with every bit of the excitement I knew they would. The only question is, what took me so long?

It was a good week to launch my intro to the magic of the woods -- J was signed up for this class on Dragons at the museum! Here the amazing Miss Anne reads the classic poem "Custard the Dragon" while the class paints their own depiction of the story. The kids were so engrossed in their work that nobody even noticed me slip into the classroom to take this photo, then slip out again.

Here's J's finished product. I particularly like the "eek!" in the middle of it all!

We will be reading a fanciful type story each week during Family Story Time. I will leave the other Flower Fairy volumes out for them to discover and embrace. I will try to write a bit more magic into our Adventure Circles. I'm going to be selecting more magical stories for our Spring Semester curriculum stories. And, hopefully, as my kids get more and more comfortable with the magic, so will I.