miniature amounts of fun

As a child I loved nothing more than playing with miniature things. Instead of a dollhouse, my mom had a shelf on an old armoire set aside for tiny furniture and small rugs that my sisters and I painstakingly sewed together, and I spent hours standing on a chair setting up rooms for the family of dolls who lived there. After I was married and living on the other side of the country far away from my family, I received a mysterious parcel in the mail. I was so delighted when I opened it up and found the miniatures, each wrapped carefully in tissue and newspaper by my mother. Every item was an old friend, and I had so much fun setting up yet another scene for the dolls on our particle-board-graduate-student-shelves, crammed between books and syllabi on human anatomy and infectious disease. In every little home we've set up since my miniatures have a special spot somewhere on our shelves and I fully plan on sending my own daughters mysterious parcels when they are all grown. Hopefully the gesture will be as meaningful and memory-laden for them as my package was for me. So, thanks, mom!

To follow up with the sad previous post - I'm putting a link button below in case you are able to donate a little (or more) to Stephanie Nielson's fund. Her family anticipates that the cost of paying for their medical bills will be well into the millions - not to mention trying to cover the household expenses for their four little children while their parents are recovering from this tragedy. This button takes you straight to an account that has been set up for them, through pay pal.