Story Time...

Walking by, can of paint in hand, I can’t help but think this dollhouse is what my great-grandchildren will find in an attic fifty or sixty years from now.

At the moment, it’s covered in dust and everything’s been knocked over. It normally sits on an antique table in a corner of the master bedroom.

As a little girl, I dreamt I’d someday have a real, honest-to-goodness Victorian dollhouse. The kind found in the nurseries of Peter Pan and Mary Poppins stories, that Wendy Darling and Jane Banks would have played with.

But alas, we were very poor. So, I made dollhouse rooms by decorating old boxes...and used toads my brother and I caught at a nearby creek as the dolls.

Yes, toads.

Fast forward to adulthood.

When my husband, Gord, and I were still in our twenties, he commuted to work. Almost an hour drive each way.

Every day, he drove by a quaint dollhouse shop. The display windows were stuffed with every Victorian dollhouse imaginable.

Now, the only kind of tinkering Gord liked to do was on cars.

He hates anything finicky.

Yet...

One day, he stopped the car, went into the charming little shop, and bought a dollhouse kit anyway. He brought it home and proceeded to spend the next several months painstakingly sanding, painting, gluing, and nailing it together for me for Christmas. He hated the work, but was determined I have my Victorian dollhouse.

Thank goodness our son is as sentimental as we are. I‘m pretty sure someday his own grandchildren will find the old dollhouse in an attic. He’ll let out a shallow sigh and with a small smile tell them, “You know...your great-grandfather built that for your great-grandmother back in the late 1900’s."