It’s easy to call your daughter a “princess,” but actually making her a real one sounds like something out of a fairy tale. Yet, one father turned that dream into reality. This is the story of Jeremiah Heaton, who lives in Virginia, the United States.
When his youngest daughter Emily said her dream was to become a princess, he didn’t just laugh it off. Instead, he began searching for a way to make her wish come true. To be a princess, she would need a kingdom, and for that, land. After much research online, he discovered an unclaimed area of land in Africa. It was a stretch of desert between Egypt and Sudan, a disputed border region where no country had officially claimed ownership for a long time. On Emily’s seventh birthday, Heaton traveled there with his family. He planted a flag and declared the birth of a new kingdom. Then he gently placed a small crown on Emily’s head and officially named her a princess.
He said, “It’s more important for my daughter to be a princess than for me to be a king,” and, “I wanted to show my children that there was nothing I wouldn’t do—even go to the ends of the earth—to help their dreams come true.” Whether or not his new kingdom is ever officially recognized as a country, it seems that a kingdom built with a father’s love is already very real in the hearts of his children.