Growing up as a missionary kid, I spent my free time setting up cities for 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
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