I guess ever since I first had any kind of rudimentary understanding about how genetics worked, I could never figger out what the big fuss was about skin color et al. People can study their family’s geneaology from here to kingdom come but most of us can only go back a few centuries at the most. Before that? Who knows which individuals made their way through the British Isles (where my ancestors are originally from). I only know teensy little bits. Or not. Macbeth anyone? Daniel Boone? What might be hanging about in my DNA besides the usual Celtic crap? Who knows. Anyway, I suppose I’m done with that subject for this round. I don’t have the answers or even the questions.

So I’ll blather about dolls instead. My kids, like those of some others who commented yesterday, weren’t really all that interested in dolls in the grand scheme of things, orange baby and Leona Millie and some of the “colored” dolls (pink doll, green doll, etc.) excepted. Oh, there were the Barbie years. Yes. I know. My opinion? Body image, schmody image. Folks, in my pretty humble experience, ages 3-5 were when the kids were interested in Barbie. Why were they interested? Because all the other little girls would bring their birthday Barbies in to nursery school for show and tell. So yes my kids had Barbies. It’s all about ownership at that age and actually, I rather enthusiastically supported it.

They had Barbies and Barbie cases and a Barbie dreamhouse and all kinds of clothes and accessories. And what did they do with them? I don’t even know. All I know is that the whole business was one great big mess and we were always losing the shoes and we had a couple of Barbies whose heads kept popping off, so there would be Barbie heads rolling around.

When the older beach urchin was in about 2nd grade, I found a Barbie case down in the dungeon full of *spy* equipment! Every remote control device in the house was in it. Hmm. It was within the next year that they happily sold off their Barbie stash lock, stock, and barrel, at the one and only garage sale we’ve ever had. They were tired of playing with her. I don’t think they really knew what to do with her. It was hard to deal with the clothing and it was much more fun to make goofy looking aminals and puppets talk and do crazy things.

So, what about that body image thing? Sheesh! These kids were somewhere around six and eight when they voluntarily got rid of their Barbies. They weren’t thinking about their weight or whatever in those days. They were more interested in running around like hooligans at that time of their childhood. Playin’ spyyyyyy. Etc. Gimme more o’ that fluorescent orange mac ‘n’ cheese please, Mooma!

G’night! KW

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.