Thursday, July 30, 2026 The Dollhouse

When I was young, my mother and her dad, my grandfather, worked secretly to make a large dollhouse for us kids for a Christmas gift. Mom bought some very special doll furniture for it, but soon realized that we were just going to break it all, so she boxed it up and put it in her closet. I don’t think at the time we appreciated what a grand edifice it was, but I hope that we played with the dollhouse enough to give my mom and grandpa true satisfaction after having spent so many hours of loving labor over it.

Fast forward about 30 years. After four boy babies, we finally had a girl! I called my mom and dad almost immediately and asked them, “Do you still have that dollhouse?“ When the answer was yes, I claimed it. It had to be extricated from the storage area under the basement stairs. Dad had removed and discarded the four stately columns in front of the house in order to make it fit in the storage area, much to my mother’s dismay. I claimed the special boxed up furniture, too. In my childhood it had seemed a great injustice to have those items unavailable. I let my children play with them, and guess what? They broke a few pieces. Oh well.

It was a bit of a fixer-upper. The roof was gone (also removed to make room for storage). My husband made a new roof and I cut up little pieces of sandpaper and stapled them on for roofing tiles. The kitchen and bathroom linoleum were in bad shape so I took those out and replace them with new shelf paper. Several of the doors were hanging off their hinges (they still are). My husband bought new lights for each room and set it up so we could plug it in and turn them on. I repainted the house and opened it for business.

Fast forward another 30 years. The dollhouse is in our basement. It is quite large and I don’t know if any of our children will have room for it. When we have families over with children, which we do fairly regularly, I like to show off the dollhouse and let children play with it. The last family we had here had a lot of young children, and we left them completely unsupervised with it. When I looked at it a couple weeks later, everything was higgledy-piggledy. I couldn’t even find the dolls! That was over a month ago.

Today, I went down the basement to do something that had nothing to do with the dollhouse. Straightening up the dollhouse was not on my to-do list. Nevertheless, when the spirit moves, one must move with it. I spent over an hour taking everything out and putting it back in its proper place. I have always taken the world of dolls very seriously. It didn’t sit well with me when the missing dolls showed up crammed into one of the closets.

I wonder now if children have forgotten to play with something like this. Do they need a little guidance? I like to think of them moving the dolls around the house in a purposeful way, like setting them down at the dining room table to eat, and putting their food on the table for them. After supper, the family could sit in the living room while dad reads the Bible. Perhaps mother could play the piano. Grandpa and grandma would sit in their comfortable chairs by the fireplace and read the newspaper.

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The next time we have a family over, I will continue to welcome the children to play in the dollhouse. But I might stick around for a while to show them how it’s done, to spark their imaginations as they play with this little family in their little house.

I’ll have to resist the temptation to be too controlling; I already feel the impulse welling up in me.

I’m going to have to straighten this post up in the morning.