Christmas comes early

I wanted to get the girls a nice doll house this Christmas. It was really hard to find something. The Barbie mansions are like 2 stories and really cheap. Plus they are really expensive - well over $100. So I started looking at the wooden doll houses. Those are over $100 too and they still seemed small for all of my kids to try and play with it at once. I think we got spoiled by Ted and Emily's girls' doll house. It is huge and wooden and has three sides of play. So, I set out for Craigslist and found one smaller wooden dollhouse like I wanted and one large house like Emily's. Michael liked the larger one and it was the same price as the smaller one (which was less than any of the new store ones). We had to drive an hour north to pick it up, but the people we bought it from met us half way to Prescott and were willing to work with us. I was very sick that day with the beginning of my upper respiratory infection. It always seems to rain when we go to Prescott. Wouldn’t you know that it rained right as we were getting home. Then we found a new problem. The house would not fit through any of our doors. Not the sliding door, not the garage door, and not the front door. We put it in the garage. Michael woke me up early the next morning to help him get the frame through the door (he had taken it partially apart). One side of the roof had sun fading and so I painted it purple instead of the bright pink it was. We went ahead and gave it to the kids since they were in the car when we got it and it is too big to hide. They love it and play with it every day. Even Merrick plays with his pirates and boy toys in it. I would have been in heaven to have this as a young girl. I hope my kids enjoy it.

*Notice that Merrick is standing on a chair and it is still taller than him!