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Caregiver Lorrie Shortridge wheels Cathleen Costello up the ramp into her workshed in the backyard of her Oakdale home on Aug. 18, 2022. Costello, 14, who has a rare genetic condition, is non-ambulatory and non-verbal. She and Shortridge have bonded over a fascination with fairies, creating a fairy wonderland in the front and backyard of Costello's home. (Bryson Rosell / Pioneer Press)
Pixie Park, seen Aug. 18, 2022, is an interactive accessible fairy garden diorama created in the yard of Cathleen Costello's Oakdale home. For the last three years, Costello and her caregiver, Lorrie Shortridge, have created the fairy wonderland, with help from Anella Rosckes, Camryn Handberg and others in their group. (Bryson Rosell / Pioneer Press)
Cathleen Costello, left, and Anella Rosckes, middle, greet Camryn Handberg as she arrives to help work on their fairy garden dioramas at Costello's Oakdale home on Aug. 18, 2022. (Bryson Rosell / Pioneer Press)
Caregiver Lorrie Shortridge helps Cathleen Costello use her sander at Costello's favorite work bench in the backyard of her Oakdale home on Aug. 18, 2022. Costello, 14, who has a rare genetic condition, is non-ambulatory and non-verbal. She and Shortridge have bonded over a fascination with fairies, creating a fairy wonderland in the front and backyard of Costello's home. (Bryson Rosell / Pioneer Press)
Lorrie Shortridge makes funny faces to make Camryn Handberg laugh in Cathleen Costello's fairy workshop. (Bryson Rosell / Pioneer Press)
Cathleen Costello in her workshop in the backyard of her Oakdale home, where she and her friends gather to work on their fairy garden projects, on Aug. 18, 2022. For the last three years, Costello and her caregiver, Lorrie Shortridge, have created a fairy wonderland at Costello's Oakdale home. (Bryson Rosell / Pioneer Press)
Cathleen Costello’s favorite colors are pink, purple and green, in that order. Her favorite foods are chocolate ice cream and cottage cheese. Her favorite band is Jonas Brothers. Favorite brother? Joe. Nobody else even ranks.
But Cathleen’s absolute all-time favorite thing in the world is fairies. She loves everything fairy – figurines, stickers, notebooks, books, T-shirts, wings, costumes and lights. At the pixie peak of that list are fairy houses.
Fortunately, Cathleen, 14, has found someone who shares her obsession with the magical miniature worlds: Lorrie Shortridge, one of her special-education paraprofessionals at Stillwater Area High School.
The friendship forged over fairies has led to the creation of a fairy wonderland in the front and back yards of Cathleen’s house in Oakdale. The two also designed and built a “fairy table” that uses accessible switches and buttons so people with differing abilities can play fairy-related games. This summer, they worked with other fairy-fanatic friends to create a fairy table for the “Magical Fairy Village” event in Oak Park Heights.
“We call ourselves the fairy spirits,” Shortridge said. “We spend so many hours just working and imagining and creating things, and she just loves it. It’s so good for her physically and emotionally because she’s working with her hands and her mind. She loves her power tools. She’s a girl after my own heart in that regard. She likes to have a project where she can use at least one power tool.”
Cathleen was born with a rare genome variant that results in a seizure disorder that requires constant supervision. She is non-verbal, non-ambulatory and requires 24-hour support.
Cathleen makes her likes and dislikes known through sounds and facial expressions. When she’s working with fairies, she makes a special noise – “her happy sound,” according to her mother – and her whole face lights up.
Fairies have given Cathleen a chance to form meaningful relationships and share her talents with the community, said Danielle Costello, Cathleen’s mother.
“All anybody wants is to feel included and part of a group or part of a community,” Costello said. “It’s great for typical kids to learn how to interact with different kinds of people and also for our kids to learn how to interact with typical people and also be treated as just another student and just another friend. That’s all anybody wants – to be paid attention to.”
Costello credits Shortridge for helping Cathleen find her passion and for helping “the rest of us engage with Cathleen and challenge and interact with her,” she said. “She’s found a way to engage both typical and atypical teens in an activity that sparks the imagination.”
Don Costello and Danielle Peterson met through friends in October 2001 when they were both invited to see the band Casablanca Orchestra at Bogart’s in Apple Valley. They were married in July 2003 and moved to Oakdale in 2006. Don Costello is a lead business consultant at Perficient; Danielle Costello is a quality engineer at Medtronic.
Cathleen, their only child, was born in 2007 at United Hospital in St. Paul. The couple didn’t notice anything different about their daughter until she turned 9 months old.
“She wasn’t progressing as a typical child would,” Danielle Costello said. “She wasn’t sitting up or holding toys.”
It wasn’t until 2018 that doctors determined Cathleen, then 11, had the rare genome variant CACNA1E. Her seizures are controlled by medication, but on five different occasions, she’s had to be taken by ambulance to deal with a severe “breakthrough seizure,” Danielle Costello said. “If not for medication, she would probably have a seizure 20 times a day – each one lasting five or 10 minutes,” she said.
Cathleen and Shortridge were paired together for the first time when Cathleen was in kindergarten at Lake Elmo Elementary.
The following year, Shortridge, who lives in North Hudson, Wis., started working for the Costellos as their after-school and summer caregiver. She drives to the Costellos’ house every school day and rides the bus to and from school with Cathleen.
Three years ago, Cathleen and Shortridge were taking a walk at the Discovery Center in Oakdale when they found a little fairy display “kind of tucked in with some trees,” Shortridge said. “She really liked it, so we went and got some fairy things.”
That initial shopping spree at Dollar Tree was a success, and Cathleen’s fascination with fairies was born.
“She just started building things for fairies,” Shortridge said during a recent tour of Costellos’ front-yard fairy garden. “She started to do things on the ground level, but then we built up – with pallets – so they would be accessible for her. It has turned into this: a little magical fairyland.”
The fairy gardens are built on tables made from recycled pallets that allow Cathleen and friends, some of whom also use wheelchairs, to get right up to the different fairy gardens.
“We would find pallets on the side of the road when we were out driving around or friends would have pallets and drop them off,” Shortridge said. “They just kind of come from wherever.”
Their preferred pallet design includes using a big pallet in the middle and two pallets on the side. Cathleen likes to plant flowers in the planter boxes on top of the two side pallets, she said.
Every creation – like “Fairy Flying Carpet” and “Fairy Food Shack” – is labeled with wooden Scrabble tiles. The details are extraordinary. There are miniature shutters, tiny teacups and pint-sized pinecones. “The shutters are shutter samples from Menards,” Danielle Costello said. “I grabbed them and thought, ‘Oh, those will be great for her fairy house.’”
In the garden, there are dozens of fairy figurines, and old glass bowls and vases have been turned upside down and glued together to look like mushrooms.
“We just had fun with any recycled things she could find,” Shortridge said.
Cathleen and Shortridge regularly eat lunch with the fairies in the fairy garden. “A lot of ice cream is eaten out here,” Shortridge said. “She usually likes chocolate and caramel, but strawberry has kind of been a big hit this summer.”
Cathleen and Shortridge soon started inviting friends over to build fairy creations with them, including Anella Rosckes, 13, of Stillwater, and Camryn Handberg, 14, of Cottage Grove. The girls have known each other since they attended the same Early Childhood Family Education class in Stillwater. They were also students together at Lake Elmo Elementary and Oak-Land Middle School in Lake Elmo.
Shortridge started the Friendship Club at Oak-Land so typical and atypical students could get to know each other. The club’s motto is: “On wheels we fly.”
“Even though they have some disabilities, they can still do everything, they just need a little extra help,” said Adele Majeski, 14, of Baytown Township, who also will be a freshman at Stillwater Area High School this fall. “It’s a group of friends. We just hang out and try to promote understanding and awareness.”
The group’s latest project was building the “Unicorn Rainbow Relay Race,” which was displayed at the “Magical Fairy Village” event in July at Autumn Hills Park in Oak Park Heights.
Working on fairy projects has given the students “a pathway to spend time together,” Danielle Costello said.
“From what I’ve seen between the kids, they’re treated just like other students. They’re just other kids,” she said. “Working on the fairy workshop was about ‘What can we build together, and how can we show that off and spend time together?’ because I think it does get harder for kids as they get older to know what to do together – let alone if you can’t communicate typically.”
The fairy-construction zone is in the Costellos’ back yard where a fairly recent addition – a large pink-and-green “she shed” with six large windows, fairy lights and a crystal chandelier – has been designated “Cathleen’s Fairy Workshop.”
The specifications for the shed – custom-ordered from Strauss Skates in Maplewood – gave the employees pause, Costello said.
“They were like, ‘What colors do you want?’” she said. “They were laughing because I kept adding windows to it, and they said, ‘You have enough windows.’ I’m like, ‘Well, it’s not really a shed.’ … The person delivering it – because they deliver it fully built – said, ‘We kept wondering what man ordered this shed? I said, ‘It wasn’t a man. It was a girl for her fairies.’”
Last summer, the shed was Sheet-rocked and painted and made to look “more fairy-ish,” Costello said. A work bench – a recycled door – was built to fit three girls using wheelchairs. The sign above the work bench reads: “Princess Parking Only. All Others Will Be Toad.”
Shortridge spotted the shed’s chandelier across the street from the Costellos’ house one morning last summer. “It was sitting on the corner,” she said. “I pulled in that morning, and I was, like, ‘Oh my goodness, Cathleen, let’s go.’ We went right over there, didn’t we Cathleen? and picked it up. We spray-painted it pink and put on sparkles and hung it up.”
Shortridge’s boyfriend, Kevin Reilly, helped with the wiring and other finishing touches, she said.
Shortridge works closely with Erin Mathaus, another special-education paraprofessional. The two women have worked with Cathleen and Camryn since grade school.
When Cathleen and Camryn graduated to Oak-Land Middle School, Stillwater school district officials allowed Shortridge and Mathaus to move with them. The four will move to Stillwater Area High School this week.
“Whenever possible, we strive to provide continuity in the student-paraprofessional relationships,” said Caitlyn Willis, the district’s assistant director of student support services. “We know that our exceptional paraprofessionals are an integral part of our students’ success. I am thankful to work in an organization that understands and prioritizes the value of these relationships and experiences.”
Said Mathaus: “We’ve all been together for so long, it’s like a family. It’s great.”
The girls have some classes together, but the families also try to schedule some apart. “We don’t want them to be in every class together and have it be, ‘Oh, here comes the wheelchair brigade,’” Costello said. “We try to give them their own identities. It’s fun that they have this (fairy) activity together because they do get along really well, but then it’s also nice that they have their own interests.”
Cathleen and Shortridge, for example, are signed up for a woodworking class this semester. “We’re excited about that,” Shortridge said. “We’ll both be learning a lot in there.”
Mathaus, of Lake Elmo, said everyone benefits from having the girls take part in different classes.
“You see how important it is to be part of something bigger than yourself,” she said. “We learn so much from being with these guys all the time. It’s important also for their gen-ed friends to see that they can have fun with them. They can’t do it all by themselves, but it just brings awareness and it brings so much happiness too. (The girls) teach us stuff every day. They love school, and they just want to be a part of it all.”
The fairy friendships will continue as Cathleen gets older, Costello said.
“This is something that she can continue to do and continue to enjoy,” she said. “It’s a hobby for her. Sometimes it’s a challenge for us with kids who can’t express hobbies or likes. When you find a like, you can then build on that. That’s true for anybody, but then I think if somebody is going to be at home longer, it’s nice to start building this now, so she has something to do as she gets older.”
Don Costello has wondered if everything in their Oakdale yard is going to be co-opted by fairies, she said.
“He’s like, ‘Is anything not going to be fairy?’” she said. “I’m, like, ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’”
She said she can’t believe how lucky they are to have found Shortridge.
“I finally found someone who loves Cathleen more than me,” she said. “Surround yourself with wonderful people and wonderful things happen.”
That’s the magic of fairies.
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