The Speelgoedmuseum



The stairwell was a bit steep!



During our recent visit to Amsterdam, we stopped at a very small toy museum in the seaside town of Hoorn.  The museum was located in a seventeenth-century home in a quiet neighborhood.  The owner lived on the main level while the toys were displayed on the upper floors.   So, up we climbed to the third floor and worked our way down.   Although it was much smaller than we had anticipated, it was quaint and diverse, and to my surprise, there wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere. 

A display board hung in the last room with pictures and comments from children who had visited the museum.  Among the sweet comments, the one that really made me smile read, “I found the toys old.  And the woman from the toy museum was old.”

The Three-Letter Word

My husband’s sister recently introduced him to Scrabble on the iPad and H absolutely loves it.  He usually plays a couple of games each night before going to bed, grumbling over words played by the computer that can’t be found in the Scrabble Dictionary and then cheering himself on when he outplays his invisible opponent.  It’s a good brain challenge for him.

H also works from home and I have discovered that at lunchtime he has been playing a game or two while sitting in my office with P the cat perched on his lap, observing.  I really didn’t think much about it, other than I was pleased that the cat had some additional human one-on-one time during the work day.  That is, until I heard H talking to the cat last night.

What’s that you say?  You found a triple-word score?  CAT?  That’s great!

Later H confided to me, The only problem is that P only knows three- and four-letter words, which doesn’t give us a very high score.

Hmmmmm…maybe I need to be concerned.