On a few recent occasions, I've noticed that the girls have shown interest in other kids' "pretend" toys -- dollhouses, train sets, play farms, etc. -- so I started keeping my eyes open for something along the same lines to add to their toy collection. (The toy collection which, incidentally, is gradually overtaking our living room, spreading like a brightly colored, plastic rash.) I did some Craigslist searching, bid halfheartedly on a Fisher Price Noisy Farm on eBay (and didn't win), and posted on my MOT club listserv, but to no avail. In the end, it was Freecycle that did the trick.
Freecycle, in case you're not familiar with it, is a network of community groups/ listservs for giving and getting free stuff. It's a great way to get rid of things you don't need any more but don't want to bother trying to sell or wouldn't be able to, and also a wonderful way to score a whole variety of random stuff for yourself -- everything from computers to books to extra zucchini from people's gardens. Its main purpose is to reduce waste, but it's also a great way to save money. So if you're both cheap and green(ish), like me, you absolutely must check it out.
When I tried to explain the concept to my husband he was aghast. "You mean people just give stuff away? For free? Why don't they sell it? What's the matter with these people? I don't like it." I reminded him that while he was an economics major in college, he'd ended up becoming a folk singer, and it really wasn't very folk-singer-ish of him to be skeptical about such a lovely, communal sort of system, now was it? (He didn't really object anyway. He just likes to play Ricky Ricardo to my Lucy whenever I come up with some kooky new harebrained scheme, like exchanging free stuff with random strangers.)
Anyway, I posted on my local Freecycle list to see if anyone had a dollhouse or toy farm or the like that they were giving away, and a few days later got a response from a woman in the next town over who had a Dora dollhouse, complete with furniture, that her daughter didn't play with anymore, that she'd be happy to hand over. Wahoo!
Now, if I had my druthers, of course, I'd give the girls a lovely, handcrafted wooden dollhouse constructed by unionized elves and painted with organic, all-natural paints. I'm not a huge fan of plastic toys based on TV shows or other trademarked characters, and at this point the girls don't know Dora from a small, explorer-shaped hole in the ground. But druthers are expensive and this dollhouse was free. Free, I tell you! And as trademarked characters go, Dora's probably not a bad choice, right? She teaches kids Spanish and Latino culture and...um...explores things. More importantly, the girls love the dollhouse, and I got to feel like a total hero bringing it home.
The first thing they did was try to sit on the little dollhouse chairs. Ha! I find this so funny and so fascinating: they know it's a chair (even though it's only three inches high) and therefore assume -- quite logically, if you think about it -- that it's meant to be sat upon. Then we put the dolls (it came with Dora's mom and some little boy with a backpack. Diego?) on the beds and said "Night night." The real hit, though, was the miniature jungle gym, complete with slide. After trying to climb onto it themselves, the girls figured out that they could make the dolls go down the slide. And they even said, "wheee!" as they did it, just like they do at the playground -- totally unprompted. So cool! I love seeing them figure out this concept of pretending, drawing on material from their own lives.
Unfortunately, they also figured out how to trip all the little devices in the house that can "talk," so for the next hour I had to listen to Dora screaming things like "LET'S GET SOMETHING TO EAT FROM THE REFRIGERATOR! EL REFRIGERADOR!" Fortunately, this feature can be turned off.
Watching the girls play with the dollhouse, both me and Alastair grinning and laughing, I was reminded of pictures of my brother and me on Christmas morning, playing with new toys, our mother or father looking fondly -- even giddily -- on. As a kid, you have no idea just how much fun it is for grown ups to give you things. I'm sure that the joy I took -- and continue to take -- in watching Elsa and Clio try out their new toy is ten times the joy they get from playing with it. What a delightful and surprising thing to be able to experience this part of childhood again, but in a completely different and more profound way.
And did I mention the dollhouse was FREE??!!
