When you're an only child...

...you need to be creative about entertaining yourself in your spare time. It makes me smile when I think back over the storylines that have played out in our home through the years.  One little character came out on a regular basis when Elizabeth was between 2 and 4 years old.  Her name was Holly Tado and she had 100 children.  And this was no exaggeration as I saw her give birth to most of them in various corners of the house!  For awhile, we watched several seasons of "Little House on the Prairie" as a family.  The television series was known for being rather dramatic, to say the least...  So during that period in time Elizabeth found a lot of abandoned babies beside the road and her dolls were almost always deathly ill. Nowadays, we're into historic reinactments that are a little more realistic--currently we're in the Revolutionary War era.  Cardboard boxes often disappear from the recycling pile and turn into carriages, beds and houses for her babies.  Furniture and blankets and scraps of ribbon and tinfoil disappear and reappear in new forms as well...  You have to be rather careful what you throw away around here--I've been scolded for throwing out a valuable piece of cardboard on more than one occasion!  Shortly before Christmas, she staged her dolls in the corner of the living room: 

 Naomi (seated on the floor) is weaving cloth on her loom.  Kirsten is cooking (her pot is molded out of a scrap of tinfoil).  This was before she got all of the new doll clothes for Christmas, so both dolls are wearing dresses that Elizabeth wore when she was a baby.  :-) Much of Beth's spare time is spent wearing various dress-ups (most of which are old dresses of her mother's).  But, occasionally, she emerges in something a bit more...unique? 

 Yikes!  Occasionally, she stumbles upon a brilliant discovery--like the maternal shape of her night gown when standing over a heat vent in the living room: 

  

Some of her pajama discoveries are equally amusing but slightly less brilliant:

This one seemed like a good idea at the time...

...but then the zipper stuck...

...and she tipped over...

I'm so thankful for our little girl.  This house would be so quiet and so very BORING without her!