Two weeks ago we thought we had planned a lovely Sunday activity complete with birds, water and puddle splashing… and it blew up in our face. Despite doing everything right, our fae hated everything. This Sunday, we decided to go to a garden centre. That was it, the whole plan! Go to a garden centre, maybe buy cake whilst there. Done. Full stop.
Well, as we approached the centre, we found that the car park was full to bursting (yay Xmas?) and so drove on. With no sense of what to do now, we ended up driving randomly onto the Yorkshire Moors, ending up at a place called Roseberry Topping. This was somewhere we’d wanted to visit because, for some unknown reason, both my husband and myself find the name entertaining.
Having parked and extracted our fae from the back, she took one look at this mini-mountain and I swear the words ‘challenge accepted’ appeared in a thought bubble above her head. She then proceeded to march inexorably straight up the path. As with most of the moors and natural inclines, there are multiple paths up, varying from incredibly steep to not so steep. Our fae, apparently, only does straight lines. And so off we went, being led on this mad climb by a deranged 4 year old who set a pace that left most adults in her dust (including me) as she bounced up a 1 in 3 incline staircase.
We tried repeatedly to convince her we didn’t need to go all the way to the top, with its sheer drops and slippery steep paths. We failed. We barely even managed to get her to pause occasionally for breath.
This walk was only 1.2km long, but it was all up this wet, steep slope, so I swear it felt like 5 miles. Out of the three of us, she was the only one even remotely appropriately attired – note for future reference, Doc Martens are brilliant for lots of things but NOT hiking, and my husband informs me that sandals aren’t brilliant either.
The view from the top was, it must be admitted, breathtaking. Once we got our breath back. And our fae was delighted with the entire walk up, and good as gold on the way down too. She even took it in stride when, after promising her chocolate cake to keep her strength up, the restaurant we stopped at for the purpose served food that all three of us found unacceptable. Not a murmur. We just came home and she had a hot chocolate instead. Followed by the inevitable bath.
So, what we have learnt from these two incidents is: planning seems pointless; and always carry hiking boots in the car as fae children seem incapable of leaving a challenge half completed.
Raising the Modern Fae 