Dollhouse Dilemma

It’s not really a dilemma. I just like alliteration.

It’s more just mixed feelings about this PlanToys Green Dollhouse on Franklin Goose.

I love the idea of a dollhouse. When I was a kid, I loved arranging the little furniture and playing with the little people, and imagining I lived in the little house. As a parent, I like the idea of giving my children a way to role play family relationships.

On the one hand, I love this dollhouse. I love that it’s wood, that it’s sustainably produced, that it’s open and therefore easy to play with from multiple angles, that it’s solid and built to last through multiple generations. I love that it introduces kids to concepts of “green” building, with the wind turbine and the solar panels and the recycling bin and the rain barrel. And there are passive solar elements to its design. How awesome is that? And we would have built-in gift suggestions for family members as they help us buy the little furniture and accessory sets to add to it. I love it.

On the other hand, I have that emotion that leads me to kind of wrinkle my nose and raise one eyebrow. It’s nothing as strong as disgust. More a kind of self-consciousness about the potential of having such a nice, pricey dollhouse that’s so blatantly “green.” I mean, a passive solar dollhouse? And what about this “green” technology? Will these innovations stand the test of time? Or will my kids be embarrassed to pass this down to their kids because it’s so outdated twenty to thirty years from now? If I bought this, would it just be taking my granola-y middle-class ways to a ridiculous extreme? Is this a yuppie dollhouse?

Oh, how I hate the holiday season. So many things to want! So many opportunities to feed my guilty desire for the acquisition of material possessions through gift-purchasing for my children!

Oh, how I love the holiday season. Such a sense of freedom to consume! Such a great built-in excuse to buy all of those fun things I’ve been telling myself the kids don’t really need! Isn’t one of my personal commandments to “Give until it feels good“? It would feel good to give this to the kids!

Maybe I should just buy the dollhouse for myself. My husband can put it under the tree for me (he’s requested that I just buy some things I want then pass them along to him to wrap and say they’re from him. “It’s like a gift to me not to have the stress of trying to pick something out for you,” he says. Here I thought the gift to him was the two packages of boxer briefs I bought him at Costco).

I’d let the kids play with my dollhouse from time to time, so long as they don’t rearrange the furniture without first consulting me.