Because I am petty and immature

I was just reading one of my favorite blogs (sweetjuniper) about an awesome dollhouse he built for his daughter. This got me to thinking about an experience I had with a dollhouse that to this day still almost makes me pee my pants with laughter.

See below in that class picture? Front row, dark blue outfit with rainbow-striped suspenders? That is Cheri McMasters, most popular girl at Hawthorne Elementary. Besides Kim, Cheri was one of my best friends. We had a complicated relationship, Cheri and I, as most sixth grade girls do, and I was secretly insanely jealous of her. First, as mentioned, she was wildly popular. Second, she was one of two daughters who were lavished with love and attention by her parents (her mom called her "Little Darling of the Sweethearts"...) She was fawned over by all the boys at school, all the girls wanted to be just like her, she always had great clothes (which we immediately copied) and also: she had all the coolest toys ever.

So one year her doting father built, for her birthday, this extremely elaborate 3-story Victorian dollhouse. It was full of the most beautiful reproduction mini-Victorian furniture, sweet little rugs, and even had teeny-tiny canned food in the see-through kitchen cabinets! Oh, how I burned with envy. Of course she had to show it off and invited me to stay the night. As the Powder Pink paint (her favorite color of course) was still drying on her new Victorian Dollhouse, we lay on her pink canopy bed talking. The lights were still on and we finally got tired enough to turn them out. We'd been telling really creepy stories and we argued over who had to get out of bed to turn the lights out. Somehow she lost. We were giddy with fear and spazzy as only 12 year old girls can be; she raced across the room to hit the light switch, and literally LEAPT through the air back toward the bed. But in the dark, she'd miscalculated the bed's location, and all I heard was the loud crash of freshly painted wood....