Growing up, I loved building little cities for my dolls. I remember having the “Apricot” girl from Strawberry Shortcake land, and my two younger sisters each had a doll. My doll’s head smelled like peaches, and the Strawberry Shortcake doll smelled like strawberries. The Blueberry doll smelled like blueberries. Anyway, I would make a house for each doll, making the furniture out of card stock paper. I even made a piano out of paper once, carefully drawing the black and white keys according to what an actual piano looked like.
I would set up stores. I would make tiny toilet paper rolls by getting scissors and cutting actual toilet paper into tiny strips. Then I would roll up each one, putting a tiny dot of tape to hold each one shut. I made a stack of about a dozen tiny toilet paper rolls, and they looked great at the store in my doll city.
In those stores I made racks to display magazines. Then I went ahead and made tiny magazines with full-color pictures and actual information, written very small.
I would get small containers, and they would become cars, beds, dressers, or anything I wanted. For example, I could glue cloth to a checkbook box and add a pillow, and it became a bed. A car would be a box covered with construction paper, with glued-on wheels.
My sisters and I also played with barbies. We did not have a real dollhouse, so we used four cardboard boxes that were an identical size, two stacked on top of two. The boxes were taped together, and I decorated each room according to what its function was. We used wrapping paper for wall paper. Then I made pictures for the walls and glued them on. I made everything I needed for each room.
Finally when I turned twelve, one of my friends got rid of her wooden doll house at a yard sale. My parents bought that dollhouse, and we finally had a real dollhouse! It was like a round wheel, with rooms that opened around the outer edge. We had to put it on a small table to walk all the way around it and reach all the rooms.
Yard sales soon brought real doll house furniture, cars, doll closets, doll clothes, and shoes. I soon had over twelve pairs of doll shoes to organize in a doll closet. It was fun. I couldn’t believe how much stuff I had. I didn’t have to make things anymore.
Unfortunately, I gave up dolls when I turned thirteen. I just abruptly stopped playing. I had grown up.
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Tags: childhood, dollhouse, dolls, Growing Up as a Missionary Kid, Guatemala
I remember those days of playing with dolls and dollhouses! How fun it was when your imagination took you away from reality for hours at a time!
Exactly! It was so fun to create everything in miniature.
I used to love to play with Barbies when I was little. My mom kept all of them and then gifted them to my daughter last year. It’s fun to see her play with the same dolls I enjoyed!
Oh how special! How neat to see the same dolls that you grew to love over the years!
I played with Barbies! I remember fondly the moments spent playing..hours would pass and I could just get away from the real world with my barbies!
It’s great for creative play!
I was such a tomboy that I would finish all my chores and my homework just so my mom would let me run across the street to play at the neighbor’s who only had boys. Why? Because all of her boys had outgrown their Legos and she would just let me sit there and play with her Legos in the den four hours
I always loved Legos, too. I would make small worlds with Legos!
I don’t know what it is about turning 13, but on my 13th birthday, I declared myself too grown up for dolls as well.
Maybe we grew up too early. I wonder why we rush childhood.