Dolls
Journey Dateline: Sunday June 24, 2007
Did you ever think of dolls as a fantasy item gift? The adorable fairy dolls, mermaid dolls, merman dolls, angel dolls, baby dolls to name just a very few = dolls are part of the fantasy world.
As a little girl, I played with dolls - they were my babies that I played house with and gave them water in a tiny little white bottle with a pretty pink lid with nipple so they could wet (it was a lot more fun as a kid than when having real babies that needed their diapers changed! But the real babies were so much more huggable and lovable and fun because they were people who responded back to hugging and being rocked in a rocking chair. I had a doll baby crib but never a doll house.
How I longed for a doll house as a little girl - the pictures were amazing in the mail order catalogs and looked like so much fun. At the Iowa State Fair one year - I discovered the gorgeous dollhouse exhibit where people who created spectacular doll houses - even with electric lights - were shown every year. The railroad train exhibit was wonderful too but that dollhouse collection was marvelous! I would go see it every year … I took my kids to see it as well.
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I had 6 tiny little dolls (about 12 to 18 inches high I think but compared to the much larger dolls that are so lovely to collect these days - they were quite tiny and they were much smaller than Barbie dolls too - they appeared to be wall or shelf decorations not dolls to play with to me since I was used to much bigger dolls for playing), each in their very own box that were dressed in foreign country costumes - Spain, Ireland, Holland, French, American Bride and I cannot remember the other country - all were lovely and so were the costumes.
I hung them on the wall - I didn’t have a book shelf for dolls - my bookshelf was always full of books - overflowing with books was more of a correct visual - I loved books and I loved reading - I still do. As a kid, I would rather read than eat. As an adult, I’ve learned to read and eat at the same time!
My childhood was filled with many fantasies that revolved around dolls and playing house and dressing them with the clothes my grandmother would make for the dolls. I didn’t have a Barbie doll as a child - I was the Barbie 
… my grandmother that raised me always called me Barbie - yes even as an adult with two kids … she still called me Barbie.
Most of my dolls were baby size (the size of a newborn baby) or some were even toddler size - I had one, a Uneeda Doll with red hair and a bright yellow dress - I had red hair and I still have the picture of me in a yellow dress from when I was somewhere between 2 - 5 years old) - that my father had bought for me before he died when I was 2 or 3 years old - I was never allowed to play with that doll - it just sat on a shelf in a box and eventually both the box and the doll fell apart into pieces.
I had one that my grandmother named Mary that looked real enough to be a baby - one of the neighbors borrowed it for a baby shower once - my grandmother was upset they didn’t bring it home right away - she loved that doll - she didn’t play with it like a child would do but she would make new clothes for it and then dress it and put it on the top of my dresser - my grandmother went to their house and demanded the doll back I was mortified!
I had a Raggedy Ann doll that I loved much better - it was bigger than the tiny ones I saw when my daughter was little - but I was a child so it may have just seemed bigger to me.
My daughter was never much for dolls … every doll I bought her, she would take the clothes off, then throw the doll in the closet. I bought her a doll house that she sat on to look at books instead of playing with - it was metal but it did not hold up to her sitting on it - I was grateful she didn’t hurt herself sitting on it when it came apart into pieces! My daughter LOVED real babies though very much. Every baby she would see anywhere would grab her attention and she would be off to coo at the baby and admire it - even now today she still loves babies!
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