Today I received an e-mail from Amazon with a link to the 2009 Christmas List of the top toys. Trying not to work today, I clicked on the link and checked it out. The first toy on the top of the list captivated my attention:
BARBIE'S DREAMHOUSE!
I had one of these from 1975...you can see it on the top. The dreamhouse of my youth had pressed fiberboard floors and walls, that had printed images of the kitchen applicances, and other house items. The three story unit had a solid roof...and the elevator went up and down by pulling a cord and it was installed in the middle fron of the house. The colors used are more realistic and earth tones, just like the 70's themselves. It stood the test of time and lots of activity and was very sturdy. I had it for years, and my younger sister played with for a few years after me. I remember my Dad selling it at a garage sale in the early 80's.
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The new version is all made from plastic, of course. The roof is not solid...it is made of a lattice work. And half of the top story is a hot tub...that holds water and works! The appliances in the kitchen are three dimensional, and the elevator is installed on the left side corner of the house, which really makes more sense in a design element, because it leaves more open rooms to play. But the thing that really gets me is the COLOR. The hot pink, light pink, magenta theme is just too much. Do girls these days really like all that PINK?
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This house reminds me of all the fun fantasy time my sister and I enjoyed and how much our play revolved around acting out versions of our soon to be adult time. We played school a lot, because I thought I wanted to be a teacher. We played "house" where I was almost always the mother, telling her and anyone else we could rope into playing what to do. In one house we lived in, we had a very large and pretty back yard with different statues and plantings. There, we played "Tour Guide" where I mostly pretended to make up stories about the different parts of our back yard and took my sister and other "tourists" on their own private tour. (In one corner my mother planted a few cherry trees. I told my tourists that this was the original cherry tree grove where George Washington cut down a tree when he was a boy...! You would have to know that I grew up in the bay area of California to know how funny that really is) Of course, my sister would beg for her turn to be the teacher, or the mother or the tour guide. And eventually, begrudingly, I would let her. But I was never as good of a student, child or tourist as she was to me. I was argumentative, rude or difficult to deal with. I corrected her when she said something wrong...or I laughed at her when she didn't have all the answers I had. And eventually, I would lose patience and make up some excuse for why we needed to stop playing that game. Or I huffed off, angry about some slight.
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I am sure this is probably a familiar story in many families. The pushy older sibling and the shy, less confident younger sibling. But sometimes I get a nagging feeling that I may have inadvertently contributed to my sister's lack of confidence she has struggled with most of her life. That in my need to be in charge, to be right, to be the one in the limelight, my sister was in the shadows without the chance to practice the skills that I have used my whole adult life now. Don't get me wrong. I can't feel guilty about this. I was a child, afterall. My parents had way more responsibility that I had in making sure their younger child was emotionally cared for.
But it does give me food for thought.
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