Out here, however, there are children with a variety of interests. My husband played with dolls, and not in a militaristic fashion. I always craved legos and made the most out of tinker toys. However, he also played with legos, and I also played with dolls. Shockingly, our interests covered a large, multi-faceted spectrum.

Most children I know are capable of enjoying different toys, but when their parents indicate that they “should” be playing a certain way, their pre-conditioned peers indicate they “should” be playing with certain items, and societal messages indicate that they “should” behave according to fabricated standards, children (who tend to be rather impressionable) are typically eager to comply.

If you would spend a little time in a non-religious pre-school classroom, I think you would recognize the fallacy in your “all girls play with dolls, all boys want guns” generalization.

When I tracked it back, and found your sir name, I was thrilled to find it as my maiden name. My father was a native of Millhousen, IN. Small world — make that, wonderful small world.

A blessed Pascha to you. Christ is risen!

Babies evidently come in little and big and it thus plain to me that neither is one homunculus exactly the size of another.

As such, it seems now entirely reasonable of you to have classified the larger body of variously-sized homunculi into “big homunculi” and “little homunculi”, if only in the interests of clarity and brevity.

My comment was hasty and ill-considered. Had I then the broad understanding of homunculi that I have now, I would not have left it. Please forgive me and accept my best wishes for a blessed lent.

“The doll is one the most charming instincts of female childhood. To care for, to clothe, to adorn, to dress, to undress, to dress over again, to teach, to scold a little, to rock, to cuddle, to put to sleep, to imagine that something is somebody - all the future of woman is there. Even while musing and prattling, while making little wardrobes and little baby-clothes, while sewing little dresses, little bodices, and little jackets, the child becomes a little girl, and the little girl becomes a great girl, and the great girl becomes a woman. The first baby takes the place of the first doll.”

I’m the sister who turned everything into a baby. And my little girl does the same thing. She even cradled a pickle spear! Little girls do love their dolls (but we call then babies)!

You are right: “little homunculi” is redundant (rather like “little baby”), but the word “homunculi” seemed to require some kind of modifier, being so unfamiliar a word to readers of less accomplishment than yourself.

And so I have transformed the “little homunculi”—poor things—into the more alliterative “helpless homunculi,” which I hope will meet with your approval, or at least with an absence of scorn.