Meet the Rabbits family!

Back when I was quite small, I loved little people. I had a dollhouse, partly furnished with stuff I'd made out of matchboxes and bits of fabric. I had a small penknife with which I wanted to carve bits of wood to make my own little people. I don't remember going very far at all with that project. But all the time, I was hoping that real little people, finding my dollhouse handy and comfortable, would move in. They didn't.

My daughter never was into dolls in a big way. She never asked for a dollhouse. But our son seemed to love little people right from the beginning. At the beginning he would pick them up and simply reenact something he'd seen on tv. Then, slowly, he started to create his own scenario. The very first time was in the pediatric psychiatrists' office, where he made a mummy and daddy doll bathe and put to bed a baby doll. And then more. Then when he started to go to play therapy, we noticed that he spent a lot of time playing with the dollhouse there.



So one Christmas, two years ago, we decided to make him a doll's house out of cardboard. We populated it with some playmobil rabbits and a little porcelain doll. We furnished it slowly.

 We used construction paper for the walls. It's lasted a lot longer than we expected it to, although it looks worse for wear!

The mum and dad of that little family are not exactly well matched. But they don't seem to mind and spend most of their time drinking tea in the living room. Sometimes they go shopping but certainly don't see the need to go to work.

The children take after both parents, as you see. The little construction worker with a broken arm is Burak, Max's naughty alter ego. He made him up a few months ago and tells stories of him climbing on the furniture and generally being extremely naughty. The girl sitting right behind him is Gulgun. In real life she accompanies Max once a week to school, to help him concentrate. In the dollhouse she looks after Burak. She certainly has her hands full chasing after him.

The kitchen is a bit bare for now, but we've just received a big playmobil fridge from ebay, filled with goodies, which we'll give Max for his birthday next week.

The bathroom also probably needs a bit of refurbishing. The toilet is just a few bits of paper glued together...This was a useful room when Max had problems washing his hair and brushing his teeth.

 And that's the hallway. Like ours it has a big basket with all the school bags. Also the fish lives there, as it does in our home. But they have a lot more cats and dogs than we do (we have none!). And also, they still haven't taken their Christmas tree down! The guy in the background is the doctor. He's on standby in case anybody gets sick.

Last year, one of the bedroom became a school room. The rabbits went to school every morning before Max did. He practiced his day with them before he had to do it for real. Sure, that meant getting up twenty minutes before we had to, but it was well worth it. He learnt not to be so afraid of school. He became more confident in his abilities to do as he was supposed to.

At Christmas we decided that the children rabbits really needed a room of their own, so we turned our advent calendar Santa's house into a school. We also gave Max some playmobil bedroom furniture and two new little people. He called the blond boy Max, and the little girl, Elif, who shares a desk with him at real school.

We moved in the school stuff we'd bougth in England over the summer - some Peppa Pig desks and characters. We made a refectory and a library and the last room doubles up as a gym and a sick room.

The school room, with Olivia, the doll version of Max' s real life teacher. The dark red wall paper worked a treat when it was Santa's house, but it's a bit strange now...

The refectory. Charlotte and I had a lot of fun making food out of Fimo. Most of it is lost now, because I've let Max and other kids play with it when I wasn't around to supervise it...

The children gather in the school library to pick books and hear stories. This rooms doubles up as the Turkish language class.The teacher is Goldilocks from the Early Learning Centre! The shelves are a bit bare... We did make some books (one of them is on the table) but they tend to go missing for some reason.

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