MamaStories

We were on the phone with my parents-in-law and I or DH made a passing reference to watching movies on a big screen tv when at our friends’ place in New York. Amie had been eating her O’s peacefully (more or less), but when she heard that, she piped up:

“We’re gonna need a big screen tv at some point.”

Me: “Where did you get that idea?!”

Baba: “Good girl.”

Really.

The place with the big screen tv also had a three-and-a-half-year-old who received a set of beads for Christmas. Amie with her attention and occasional reverence for what the bigger kids do, was immediately into it.

I got her the same set today and she has the patience for stringing about 15 beads. I am so amazed at her little fingers working like busy bees, the intense concentration on her face!

There is something about this picture… I feel I get a glimpse here of what she might look like in a few years time, maybe even in a decade or two…

Anyway, Amie doesn’t however get the point. All the beads need to be taken off the string and be returned to the box at the end. It’s a relief actually: that one box will last a long time!

In the meantime the Manush House is finished. I decided not to glue the bathroom/kitchen and the staircase onto a cardboard sheet. It would make it more difficult to move the doll house around and take it places (if ever Amie wants to do that).

Here’s the whole house (so far), with some of the proud owners taking advantage of the new facilities (note the Mama in the bathtub, the Baba in the kitchen!) and their guests, Mickey and Minnie, asleep in the living room/bedroom.

Reader Anja had suggested I send a little story about the doll house to Mothering Magazine. I was considering it when two days later said magazine arrived in my mailbox and there already was a story about making a fairy house out of trash. What a coincidence! It’s great to know more people are doing this!

In the meantime I had also sent word to Annie’s HomeGrown - the staircase is made out of three of their boxes. They loved it and guess what: they will feature the house in their next newsletter! Everyone sign up!

(*) I am happy to have made this doll house almost entirely out of trash: boxes of all sizes, aluminum foil, plastic containers and styrofoam, as well as some pictures out of magazines all bound for the recycling bin. Only the paint, glue, staples, tape and ink were new.

You can review the progress on the doll house (in chronological order) here, here, here and here and lastly here.

More pictures:
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That’s it for this installment of the Manush House. Amie is already lobbying for another addition: a bedroom. I am thinking: a piano! The living room needs a grand piano. I’m on the lookout for a good box.

Some scissor work on the IKEA catalog and the Manush kitchen and bathroom are fully equipped and ready for their new occupants. But where are they? Oh, they’re at the zoo.

Yes, there are even curtains!

What remains is fixing the whole thing - kitchen/bath unit and staircase - together onto a large cardboard sheet that will give it some stability (right now the box falls over too easily). Once it’s totally done I’ll try to take some better pictures.

Happy New York*, Everyone!

Amie went to bed a bit later after a sumptuous feast of Indian take-out. DH and I watched a crummy movie over a crummy internet connection - it felt like our old graduate student days! Only Amie woke up twice with nightmares.

Today it is snowing again, of the kind in between sleet and snow, so no walk outside as planned. But there are plenty of indoors activities, like setting up a zoo complete with a train and holding pens and zookeepers (the Manushes: they’re jacks-of-all-trades).

(*) Last year Amie mixed up “Happy New Year” with “Happy New York” because we happened to be in New York at the time. So that’s how we greet the new year now.