Dragon Dance the Rest of the Day

What started out on Chinese New Year as simply the perfect opportunity to get out the dragon puppet kits that I purchased on clearance from some big-box arts-and-crafts store long ago, so that the girls could make them, along with red cake, as our little celebration--

--turned into something else. It turned into this face:

And this face:

And then a lot of this dancing, to some Chinese children's folk music tuned into on Spotify:

How magical these kids are, to take a cheap-o out-of-the-package activity that I basically tossed at them just to clean off my shelves, the most half-assed New Year's celebration ever, and to make it into magic, too.

For the rest of the day, those two dragon puppets were The Greatest Things EVER in my daughters' eyes. They flew, they danced, they roamed upstairs and down, they played out elaborate roles in their pretend sagas:

Needless to say, math and handwriting and geography waited just fine until the next day.

P.S. I haven't seen the dragon puppets since. No doubt they were tossed down at the children's feet the moment that I called for dinner or bedtime, and, like the Velveteen Rabbit on Christmas Day, utterly forgotten. Children's magic...so wild, so fickle, so fey.