“Auntie, the Chia Pet is sprouting!” reads the text from my great niece Hazel.

Hazel lives in Alabama. I gifted her a “Minion” Chia Pet grow-it-yourself planter named Kevin when she was in town visiting over Christmas.

Hazel and I have been texting back and forth about Kevin’s “hair growth” ever since. It’s become a fun game between the two of us and it started a nice intergenerational bonding.

But it gave me pause. Hazel is 11. She’s already proficient at the slightly sophisticated skill of texting. When I was her age I was playing with paper dolls!

This makes me wonder if children are growing up too fast today. Are their computer games and smart phones and the like altogether a good thing? Should they perhaps be allowed to remain children a little longer?

I’ve kept my paper dolls all these years. They are precious to me. And they are not the store-bought kind with different attachable outfits. I was a child during the Great Depression. Such a toy purchase then would have been an unheard-of luxury in our family.

And that was not necessarily a bad thing. It encouraged creativity in kids to invent their own games using what they already had on hand. My older sister Betty created our paper dolls.

Clever Betty meticulously cut out clothing models for men, women, and children from an outdated Sears & Roebuck catalogue.

She and I then together dreamed up a paper doll “family.” We called them the “Archers”: Tom and Teresa and their kiddies, Lizzy and Billy.

The Archers “drove” a green Buick Roadmaster sedan that Betty found and clipped from the pages of an old Life magazine. They lived in a “house” of rooms pictured in some old Ladies Home Journal layouts, also neatly cut out by Betty, of a living room, kitchen, 2 bedrooms, a bathroom and den.

To “play paper dolls,” we lay the house out on the floor and sat down, legs splayed backward at the knees, in front of it. We had the Archers come and go about their lives, moving them through the rooms.

I invented “Restaurant” all by myself. Taking turns as waitress or customer, my girlfriends and I would serve the customers bits of food provided by my mother on small dishes from a toy set. I utilized the money from my older brother’s Monopoly game as currency.

This was a summer game played outdoors using lawn chairs and a small table my Uncle Emil had built for me for the restaurant booth.

And another slightly odd, kid-created, outdoor game from my youth was the “hollyhock ladies.”

My gardener mother had cultivated a large bed of multicolored hollyhocks in one section of our yard. Beverly, a neighbor girlfriend, showed me how to turn a wilted hollyhock flower upside down so that the top resembled a head and the petals a hoop skirt dress.

Our colorful hollyhock “ladies” lived regally, promenading across Uncle Emil’s table as though in an Old English court.

I wonder if Hazel would consider my childhood games boring.

I’ll have to find out when she comes to visit on school break this summer.  . .  My paper dolls are slightly tattered, but still playable.

Carol Hall lives in Woodbury. She’s a longtime freelance writer, a University of Minnesota graduate and a former Northwest Airlines stewardess.