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Magical Milestones - celebrating little victories

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Ditch the Dodo

Our fairy garden

Six things in our garden, and what each one is for. The slower way of doing this - and the reason ours worked.

This is our garden. There are six things in it worth finding - click any of them and Ditch will tell you what it's for.

Six things to find. Click any of them - or skip straight to the kit.

Stop 1 of 6 · The fairy houses

This is where we live

Hello. I’m Ditch. I live at the bottom of a garden, in a house somebody made out of a plant pot.

Ours were plant pots, an upturned saucer and a few garden ornaments, put in the flowerbed one afternoon with solar lights inside them. We never pointed them out. We let her find them on her own, and then acted properly amazed.

This is the part that does the work, and almost nobody does it. A child handed a fairy story on the night you want the dummy gone is being negotiated with. A child who has believed in the garden for months is giving a present to someone she knows. Same story, completely different night.

Stop 2 of 6 · The solar light

When are you doing this?

When the light comes on, that’s me waking up.

Every evening when the solar lights flick on, our daughter still shouts “the fairies are awake!” She has done it every night for a year. That is what you are building: not a story for one night, but a thing that is simply true in your garden.

Stop 3 of 6 · The box

Whose dummies are these?

You decorate a box, and you put every single one inside, and you leave it out for me.

A plain shoebox and twenty minutes of their own glitter. Not one you have prettied up first - theirs. A child who has spent twenty minutes on that lid has already decided.

Written into the letter and the certificate. Stays in this browser - it is not sent to us.

Stop 4 of 6 · The wellies

Is it time yet?

Usually somewhere between two and three and a half - but age is not really the test. The test is whether they can hold a story in their head for a few days and understand that giving something away is a choice they are making.

“Not this month” is a completely legitimate answer, and it is not the same as never. But be honest about whether you are waiting for the child to be ready or waiting for a week when it will feel easy. There is no week when it feels easy.

Stop 5 of 6 · The letter on the sill

What do you call it?

In the morning there’s a letter where the box was, and it’s for you.

The letter is the piece that does the work, and it is the one you do not want to be writing at 9pm the night before. Whatever your family calls it, that is the word Ditch uses.

Stop 6 of 6 · The star

And then there’s a star

Every dummy anybody gives me turns into a bit more light up there. That one’s yours now.

This is why it holds on the hard nights. You are not saying no in a dark bedroom - you are going to the window together and finding the thing they made. On a cloudy night it is behind the clouds, keeping warm. It does not stop being there.

See the kit →

The bit almost nobody does

Most advice about the dummy fairy starts on the night you want the dummy gone. Ours starts months earlier, and that is the whole reason it worked.

We put a few little fairy houses in the flowerbed - plant pots, an upturned saucer, a couple of garden ornaments, and solar lights inside them so they came on by themselves at dusk. We didn't announce it. We let our daughter find them on her own and acted properly amazed. Not everyone has fairies in their garden.

Then we talked about them. For months. Who lived in which one, what they did all day, why the lights came on. On clear evenings we went out and looked up, and she could pick out Orion's Belt before she could write her name.

So by the time we said the fairies collect dummies to make new stars, it wasn't a story invented that afternoon to get something off her. They were already in her garden. They were practically members of the household. She wasn't handing her dummy to a stranger from a book - she was giving it to them.

She's still at it. Every evening when the solar lights flick on she shouts "the fairies are awake!" She has done it every night since.

Sarah & Dan, Hull - the parents who did this first

Which one are you?

It's happening this week

The dentist said something, or nursery did, or you've simply had enough. You don't need six months of groundwork - you need a plan and a printer.

Pick an ordinary night. No birthday, no travel, nobody ill. Start at the seven-night plan, and get the letter written before bedtime.

You're thinking ahead

Your child is one, or two, and this is a long way off. You are the reader who gets the easy version - and almost nothing on the internet is written for you.

Build the garden now. Two plant pots, a solar light, and a few months of saying nothing. By the time it matters, the fairies will already live there.

Either way, the whole method is here to read. The kit just saves you writing it out at 9pm.