To want to promote a harmless but wrong belief?

I see you’ve already done it, but I was going to suggest not taking the key. Leaving it a couple of days, and then if your daughter was disappointed, suggest tidying the fairy house and making it look prettier. Then take the key. LIFE LESSON 😀

Take the key - encourage her to think and question.

"Well, what do you think happened?"
"Do you think someone else may have moved it?"
"How do you know that?"

She is 8
Truth better

She’s 8, trust is more important than make believe at this age. She’s asked you not to take the key and you told her you wouldn’t.

This is so lovely ❤️ but I did laugh at you dicking around with a horseshoe at 1am 😂

As someone crumbling under the weight of her mortgage that has just made me laugh/inhale my coffee thank you for that 😂😂.

I'd not take the fairy key right away, i would wait, maybe even for quite a while and then do it. It must take a while for fairies to find the house after all.

Oh that’s beautiful.

I was a right brat about it when I found out. I cried for hours.

Take the key, keep the magic alive! You've got a year of magic left tops, let her be a kid and feed her imagination

I spent years writing letters from the fairies to my dd...the Works is a brilliant source of tiny little bottles of glitter etc. She loved it. Went through an elaborate charade about them moving onto to another little girl when she was about 9. 😍

I never answered. I always just asked "Well what do you believe?" It let them gradually decide how much they believed. One day I forgot the tooth money (we always put teeth in a pot on the bathroom shelf for the fairy to collect) and so the fairy had to write an apology letter the next night. DD2 came to me a few weeks later and declared that she had decided it was me!

She wants fairies to be real, OP. That's what she wants. But she knows/ strongly suspects that they aren't.

Really you have to decide - your AIBU poll is pretty evenly split - there's no right or wrong here and it's just something that people have different feelings about.

I don't think that taking the key is going to do any long term emotional damage to your child.

But as she's already questioning, she'll probably suspect deep down that you took it, but she might enjoy playing along.

Glad you took the key - but deny if if she asks you! I used to write tiny handwritten notes from the fairies (when I'd forgotten to remove the tooth under the pillow!). My grown up kids have never been scarred !! It's lovely to believe in magic when you are young !

My DS2 did this about Father Christmas on fecking Christmas Day!! He went on and on about it. Asking is he real, please tell me the truth, is he real. In the end I told him the truth. He went quiet for about 5 minutes then said “well that makes Christmas even more special, now I know you worked hard to buy all my presents” I cried, it’s just about the sweetest thing he’s ever said.

I'd take it and let her believe, she's only young still. I'm late 30's and, deep down, I still slightly want to believe in fairies!

We did this when DD was about 4. Started off with a cute little letter "from a fairy". She wrote back. And thus began an 18 month correspondence with Blossom the fairy I couldn't get out of. DH thought it was hilarious. I couldn't see a way out, she loved getting these letters, I was trapped.

In the end, we moved house and the fairy had to stay behind. I'm not saying it was the reason we moved but it was definitely a happy bonus.

Learn from my mistake, leave the bloody key.

Don’t take it. Wait til she loses it. 😁

I'd have left it. Because she specifically told you not to take it, she is at the point where she wants to know the truth about whether fairies are real more than she wants them to be real. She has set up an experiment to find out, and I think you should let her.
If she seems very disappointed you can take it another time, or explain that just because the story about fairies and that house aren't true doesn't mean they don't exist in water, woods etc. That they are just not toys that you can lure if you buy the right toy from a shop...or sonething!

Op your over thinking this. Take the key and believe in fairies.

My dd is nearly -10 and last year was questioning Santa. My response was well I believe in the magic of Christmas and if I wanted presents I would believe also and she didn't mention it again. I am never ever telling her Santa isn't real and when she's old enough to completely realise I'm still saying on Christmas Eve that she needs to get into bed or Santa won't come. There is no need for the dramatic sit down and explain.

No I wouldn’t take the key, but I’m sure she will be disappointed but she’s going to quiz you on whether you took it or not and I’d feel bad lying if she kept pressing

I am a huge fan of keeping the magic alive! I still vividly remember my mum answering honestly about father Christmas when I was younger. I asked - but I wished I hadn't.

I will now NEVER let on to my children. I will tell them that magic is real until they are fully grown. My eldest is 13 and very much knows the truth (he asked a few years back but my party line has always been that FC is real with a wink when necessary if he's eye rolling me), but he still plays along for his younger siblings. No harm done, it's just fun and playfulness.

If your DD asks, be curious as to what she thinks... does she believe in magic? I would bet that she wants to. 8 is so young to lose some of that excitement!

That's what I was thinking.

I think you should start a fairy airbnb and have a visitor's book that occasionally gets filled in with reviews.

I'd get someone else to take the key

I second this, maybe write some little notes saying the fairies hope DD had a good holiday. You could sprinkle some glitter about if you can live with it being there for the next 10 years.

I used to have an amazing imagination as a child and I remember desperately hoping my mum would play along. I used to have fairy dolls and sometimes I’d say to my mum “did you see that?! They just moved themselves!”
She would always answer yes and sometimes moved them about at night when I was asleep.
My grandad built fairy houses and put sweets and and glitter in them.
I was 10 and I knew they weren’t real but I loved the magic in pretending.

I’ll never forget making a fairy house at my Nan and granddads and they bought flower fairy dolls and positioned them in the house with a dolls tea set.
My younger less imaginative sister was completely the opposite and used to say “she’s bonkers mum! They aren’t real”

I love the idea of you planning this for you return from holiday. Post holiday blues are awful and this will be a lovely surprise.

My DC1 begged me to tell them the truth about the Tooth Fairy. Which I did. Turns out they actually did NOT want to know, and were expecting me to say the Tooth Fairy was real.

So I choose to believe in magic every time now. I cannot be drawn on the “truth” of the existence of magical beings, as I just tell them I believe in magic, do they? It’s up to them…

I used to get them to leave their baby teeth in a saucer of water that the ToothFairy fished it out from, leaving a hint of pastel colour (food colouring) and a Golden Coin £1.

i read it on this very site MN and we did this until they were out of baby teeth , well they played along as they wanted the money .

Both now well adjusted fully functioning adults 😌