Childhood Toys - Things that bring me Joy Series

One of the very cool things I got for Christmas was a Fill-In Journal called 99 Things That Bring Me Joy. Each page gives me a topic and then a small space to list the things within that topic that bring me joy. For example, the very first one is "Childhood Toys You Loved". I have decided that while I am filling in the journal with basic answers, I will also - at least from time to time - expound on those answers in my blog. The space in the journal is just not very big and I love the idea!

I am not very blog-savy so I am not sure if I know how to set apart the particular blogs I write from this book in a "series", or if that is even possible but I will try to see if it is. Even if it is not, I will label each one so it is obvious that what it is.

As for today...childhood toys - what fun!

I immediately thought of 3 things

• My Bunny - when I was 5 years old my family kept an exchange student from Sweden for a year. We lived in Fort Hood TX at the time (not the most exciting place to stay now that I think of it!) and she was in High School at the time. I will be honest and say I don't remember if she brought the bunny when she came or if she bought if for me later but I know it was a gift from her. It was a LARGE bunny, especially for me at that age and I loved that she was almost as big as me. Mom had a dress in her things that at one point she was going to make for me but she had given up on - the basic dress was done but it wasn't hemmed or embellished. She gave me the dress for my Bunny. I loved it so much. I kept that bunny, IN THAT DRESS until just a few years back. Finally I had to admit that it was in such bad shape that no one would ever be able to play with it and it didn't really look good enough to lay out so it wasn't really doing anyone any good in a box in the attic so I threw it out. It was a hard day...I so love my bunny. Nope, it never had any other name.

• Lobelia - I lived a good deal of my young childhood in Germany and I was SO in love with the beautiful German dolls I would see in the stores there. They had on German clothes and they were just so pretty. I wanted one so badly but they were really more display dolls than dolls to play with and quite expensive. Right before my family moved back to the states (one of the times) a woman that was very close to my whole family bought each of us a gift and mine was one of these dolls! She had found one not quite as fancy so I could actually play with it but it still had the outfit on AND...it had red-hair! I loved her SO much and I named her after the lady who bought her for me, Lobelia. She was probably my favorite doll I ever had. That remained true EVEN after my little brother took a pen and traced every part of her face (her eyes, her lips, her nose...) I was very, very angry and heartbroken...but Lobelia was still beautiful to me.

• Nancy Doll - my Nancy doll was a stuffed clown I got randomly for Christmas one year. I don't really have a major story to tell about her except that I loved her. She had a plastic face but the rest of her was fabric and multi-colored. She had a tall pointy hat and her colors were like pinks and blues instead of the normal clown colors of like red and blue. She was so pretty.

These three were the first things I thought of, as I said. I also, of course, have many childhood books that come to mind. I think books and dolls were probably my 'toys' of choice. The only other toy I thought of made me laugh because it was a recorder. I don't think of it because I was a huge recorder prodigy or anything but merely because all 3 of my siblings and I played with that thing and somehow we found it to pass it on to my nephew to play with when he was young as well. My parents were NOT thrilled when that showed back up!