This goes way beyond spoiling your child.
Jeremiah Heaton is a father of three. Last year, his daughter Emily asked her old man if she could become a princess some day. Typical lazy dad (me) would build the girl a backyard castle, crown her mother “queen of the house” (again), make her an honorary princess and go back to burying the kid’s copy of Frozen in the backyard.
Nope. Heaton had to go all “super dad.”
Within months, Heaton was journeying through the desolate southern stretches of Egypt and into an unclaimed 800-square-mile patch of arid desert. There, on June 16 — Emily’s seventh birthday — he planted a blue flag with four stars and a crown on a rocky hill. The area, a sandy expanse sitting along the Sudanese border, morphed from what locals call Bir Tawil into what Heaton and his family call the “Kingdom of North Sudan.”
There, Heaton is the self-described king and Emily is his princess.
Heaton is now trying to get his little plot of Virginia land recognized as a part of the Sudan. According to town officials, it looks like going to Egypt was the easy part. Sheila Carapico, professor of political science and international studies at the University of Richmond, explained that Heaton needs “legal recognition from neighboring countries, the United Nations or other groups to have actual political control of the land.” Heaton says “I put down a flag, that’s good enough.”
Heaton says his claim over Bir Tawil is legitimate. He argues that planting the flag — which his children designed — is exactly how several other countries, including what became the United States, were historically claimed. The key difference, Heaton said, is that those historical cases of imperialism were acts of war while his was an act of love.
All this because his daughter asked to be a princess. Imagine what this guy will do when she starts playing with Barbies.
“I claim this Corvette in the name of Emily, princess of the Kingdom of North Sudan, pending a run of my credit score!”
[via Washington Post]