I’ve always been a sucker for magic. Since I was a kid my imagination ran wild. It still does. I dream big and don’t back down. It’s what I want for my kids. I think as adults we take things too seriously and close our minds to endless possibilities.

I can only imagine what it was like to grow up as Roald Dahl’s daughter. I did get a little glimpse of what it was like when we sat down for brunch with his daughter Lucy.

She told us about the wondrous things he did when they were growing up, and the magic of bedtime.

It was really amazing growing up with Roald Dahl as my dad because everything was a fairy tale, really, because we were sort of his lab rats so to speak. He would test his ideas and his characters and people on us, although we didn’t know it at the time. Um, we just thought that we were getting great stories and he created this whole sort of kingdom of where we lived.

This whole kind of, you know, like Disneyland and you could, could actually live there for a long time, I think. You’d get your food, you’d get, you know, it’s a destination resort sort of thing, um, and that’s sort of what our house and our garden and our orchard beyond and then fields and the woods beyond that, that’s what our rambling old house in the countryside of Bingham was like. It wasn’t fancy at all. We did not have a lot of money.

If I could give just a portion of the childhood she described to my kids I feel like I’d be winning at life.

Lucy said she’s adopted many of her father’s techniques when it comes to raising her kids.

“If I was bored, I’d wake them up at ten, eleven o’clock at night and we’d have a midnight feast together and then they’d go back to sleep and stuff like that,” Lucy said.

My daughter and I enjoyed reading and then watching The BFG together and I told her we can have a witching hour party once she accomplishes one of her big reading goals.
It’ll involve ice cream and a movie in the middle of the night.

I’m so thankful that I can travel the world and beyond though stories with my kids.

If you haven’t yet you should read The BFG, then watch it on DVD with your kids after! Now available everywhere!

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