What is it about miniature everyday things that delight children so much? Pea has about three tea sets. And a ton of dollhouse furniture. I’ve written before about her desire for a dollhouse, which she will be surprised with on the morning of her third birthday, less than one month from today.

The girls, Pea in particular, love to push around their baby dolls in little prams and strollers.

And so, surprisingly enough, it’s this giant plastic monstrosity that that’s gotten the most play-time in our home.

It’s been around since Pea’s first Christmas, when she received it from my mother, GiGi. She was all of 6 months old at the time. And she was sitting up, but that’s about it. And she would sit in front of this facade of a house for hours. Ringing the bell. Playing the songs. Listening to the dog bark. And then, she’d crawl through the door and sit on the other side. Reset the giant clock. Open the windows. Rock back and forth to one of the tunes.

Generally, I make it a habit not to hold onto toys. I like to do the occasional purge, because with so many grandparents and aunts and uncles running around, we are never at a loss for things to play with. And I cannot stand disarray. And so too many toys stress me out. Especially when pieces go missing. I panic. Every night, I put all of the pieces of the puzzles back in their place. All the books get lined up back on their respective shelves around the house, in order of size, or put back in their baskets to rest for the night, fronts facing out. Tea sets go back into their holding places, chairs at little tables get pushed back in. That’s my nature. I call it organized. I think my husband would probably call it tightly wound. But whatever you like to call it, when there’s one piece of the puzzle that’s gone MIA, I am on the floor looking under sofas, pulling up seat cushions, emptying toy boxes. And if it doesn’t turn up in about one week? The puzzle with the missing piece will go into a bag in a closet, where I’ll let it rest until 1) the piece shows up in some odd spot, or 2) I finally get rid of it because of it’s constant mockery of me and my obsessive-compulsive ways.

But we held onto this toy. It was the one constant in Pea’s childhood, the one item that would quite literally entertain her for hours and hours on end. Of course, as she got older, she forgot about it. Until, that is, her little sister Coco discovered it. And now? It is, once again, the most popular toy in our home. We spend lots of time seated around it, waiting for Daddy to come home, Pea lecturing the barking dog that he must “poop outside, please.”

We also have a cardboard house from Garnet Hill that was one of Pea’s Christmas presents. And before you say, “cardboard house? You mean a box?” It’s not a box. It’s actually a house with doors and windows and even skylights cut away. The girls have colored on it, as has their Daddy. And currently, Pea loves to lock her little sister in there. Not kidding. On occasion, I’ve even seen Coco scale her way out through a window. That tiny little girl can climb.