I just realized that my category Fun Activities, while it included two pictures of my “Christmas dollhouse,” didn’t include one of the entire original dollhouse I created for Arielle. When she was two, after Michael’s birth, I used to visit her regularly at the family home just a few blocks from mine, until one day she asked wistfully, “Can I come to your house? Do you have toys for me to play with?”

So I went out and bought a car seat for her, stocked my apartment with books and toys, and built her a doll house out of colored poster board. It featured a bedroom with a wardrobe closet and drawers; a kitchen with a sink, dish drainer, and even a paper towel dispenser, as well as cabinets that opened and a stove with an oven; and a garden with a birdhouse, potted flowers, gardening tools, a watering can, and a pool with two turtles. Its inhabitants were Kelly dolls, Barbie’s younger sisters and brothers—and eventually we wound up with quite a collection of them!

One morning—I no longer remember the date—I was rereading Karin Fisher-Golton’s charming Amazing May blogs about gratitude and felt prompted to write about something, besides penicillin and the internet, that I’m grateful for:

My writing desk faces a picture window and half a vacant lot where a sprawling coast live oak grows, a sort of grand hotel for squirrels. (Actually, there used to be more than a dozen trees that screened out the properties beyond, so that I could imagine I was living on the edge of a wood.) Throughout the day squirrels cavort up and down the oak’s leafy byways. I’ve seen them hanging by their feet from branches like trapeze artists as they munched on acorns, swinging in the breeze. I’ve also watched them taunting the orange cat that likes to loll around on my car, leaving dirty paw prints all over it. They venture down the trunk of the oak to within a foot of him, then, at the same moment he lunges, they reappear halfway up the tree.

Though my little deck stood one story up from the ground, they had no trouble scrambling up the supporting pole at one corner, so I started hiding nuts for them—to see if they could find them in and around my pots and planters of flowers and vines. They did, of course, even though I took more and more elaborate pains to hide them. In those days, every spring, one or another of my three godkids and I would make a fairy garden in a large terra cotta basin—with tiny flowers, moss, polished stones, driftwood, and a bowl of water for a pond. In the fall when all the greenery died, I’d empty out the basin, leaving just a little soil at the bottom. Throughout the winter, the squirrels could be seen jumping into it and rolling around, giving themselves dirt baths—one of the funniest things I’ve ever witnessed because, like all squirrels, they lived in an accelerated dimension of time.

Sad to say, my deck was dismantled a few years back because the wood was rotting. Then the coast live oak was over-zealously pruned, and all but two of my other arboreal neighbors were felled. Now a cement parking lot covers half the formerly “vacant” lot. But I’ll always be grateful for the delightful memories and the squirrels that still come to entertain me.

Hint: For those of you who would like to make a fairy garden with the children in your life, I found driftwood and polished stones (for aquariums) in a tropical fish store.

Before I go any further, I’m thinking, I should post a montage of scrapbook pages from “Us, Livin’ the Life”—to showcase the activities for kids and parents featured there. Among them are the following:

Using felt markers, draw a quick, spontaneous scribble with a dark marker, then color in all the sections for a beautiful abstraction.

Make a What In the World Are You Doing? booklet of your favorite answers. This is a game I made up for my godkids to pique their imaginations. Here are some of their whimsical inventions:

         What in the world are you doing riding to school on a chicken? (Michael’s answers                 invariably involved a chicken or the toilet.)

         What in the world are you doing combing your hair with a cactus?

         What in the world are you doing taking a bath in the dishwasher?

Make a cootie-catcher fortune-teller, another fun opportunity for invention. Examples from my godkids:

         You will grow a beard 1,000 miles long.

         You will eat a magical hot dog that will turn you into a bowling pin.

         You will get trapped on a desert island and the only thing to eat will be Brussel                       sprouts.

If you have a scanner and know Photoshop, you can minimize your kids’ fold-dye and other art to display as collections on a scrapbook page. Having a papercutter, too, helps!

There are no pickles or dolphins or spaceships on my tree. Half of the glass ornaments I’ve been collecting since my twenties are traditional round ones, and the remainder have a holiday season theme, broadly speaking: Christmas trees, Santas, snowmen, icicles, pinecones, candy canes, bells, stars, and hearts, as well as musical instruments (like drums, lutes, and horns) and toys (like tops, rocking horses, and locomotives). The one exception is a single strawberry—because it’s snow-capped and the first ornament I ever bought. Oh, and did I mention my myriad birds? One year the only ornament I bought was a white dove at East Bay Nursery, which has a fabulous selection. Coincidentally, my therapist, Toni, bought only the very same one, which I like to think reflects that we’re birds of a feather..

I also have a little collection of mini ornaments (above), including a wreath, nutcracker, sleigh, and gingerbread house. When my godkids were younger and came over for our annual Christmas celebration, the first thing Michael and Emma wanted to do was play “Find the Ornament”—even before they opened their presents! I had a list that I would read out one at a time, and they would compete to see who could spot it first. Of course, the miniatures were a special challenge—so much so that sometimes when Ella and I took our tree down, we couldn’t find them among the rigidly drooped branches, which accounted for some of the blank places in the box above (till I added a toy car and a mitten).

I mention all this for any parents who might like to play the same game with their kids.

Those of you who’ve read “about” (the author) on my menu bar have seen the cardboard dollhouse I created for Arielle when she was little. For the holiday season, however, I fashioned the alternate living room above and snowy yard below. The inhabitants are “Kelly” dolls, Barbie’s little sister and brother, and the lights on the little tree actually work! (I found them at Ace Hardware, part of their electric train exhibit.) 

Every year in the run-up to Christmas, I make trips to Michael’s, Crate and Barrel, and East Bay Nursery to look for things the kids can decorate to make ornaments—wood or glass or ceramic shapes of stars, Christmas trees, wreaths, etc. I also buy plain pillar candles that we adorn with sequins and ribbon, affixed with short pins. Last year I happened upon white, blown-glass trees like the one above. Arielle decked hers out with gilt edging, adhesive gems, and sequins attached with mini glue dots.

I don’t have photos of the kids’ other creations, so I’m posting a couple of my own below.