Little house in the lawn

Three or four years ago when Ava was head over heels for The Little House on the Prairie, I thought a doll's log cabin kit would be a perfect Christmas gift. I had warm, fuzzy images of Ava putting together the kit alongside her parents over the holiday vacation week. HA! Once that "gift" was opened and looked at, we soon realized that it was not going to be a simple project to bang out in a week. This 500+ piece kit was going to be a saga....a several month long project

Ultimately the project was worth all the time spent. Once the assembling, gluing, drying, painting and more drying was done (whew!), Ava's pioneer dolls (a few like this) happily moved into their new digs. The dolls had been previously shacked up in the attic of the wooden barn with the Breyer horses underneath. I remember Ava, in very much the Ingalls fashion, packing the dolls things up in the "wagon"- an old clementine box- to move into the new house.

And that pioneer family thought they had seen it all: from seven months worth of blizzards to grasshoppers raining from the sky and eating their entire crop not to mention the tumble weed balls of fire rolling straight toward their home. But they probably never imagined seeing this giant knocking at their door: Here's to many more years of happy play with the little house!