Surprise....I Goobered Up!

Yeah...you know I can never do anything important without goofing up somehow LOL!

As I was looking for blog stats to talk about in my 100th post I discovered something. It turns out that I accidentally counted a post I've never published! So this is my actual 99th published post and NEXT time will be 100 where we do our super cool give away. I'm super awesome! And yeah I know that nobody will really care if I'm one off but I care!! Dang it. So for our actual 99th post I'm going to be lame and just talk. If you aren't interested in a post with very few pictures and lots of talking then come back for my next post! I totally understand and the next one will be picture heavy and super fun!


I guess today I just want to talk about collecting as a hobby. I have a long and varied history of collecting things. I used to collect rocks when I was little. I also had a pretty large collection of My Little Ponies and a small collection of Breyer horses. After the ponies I moved on to Elmo things and keychains even though I was 13 and too old for Elmo but too young to actually have keys for keychains. Then I collected white tiger things. I mean I had white tiger everthing! I had stuffed animals and pictures and little statues! It was crazy.

Also around that time I collected nice angel statues. That was during my super Christian period! After that I collected gargoyles! I actually still have all of those.

This is Loki:

He is my favorite one and he's actually sitting on my mantel right now! Watching over my living room.

And then through college and my early 20's I collected weird rubber ducks. My favorite is always my dead duck. I kind of still collect them but I have a ton and they're not really being displayed right now. So I haven't picked any new ones up in a while! I even had rubber ducks on my wedding cake:

Other than the ducks I currently have two big (and active) collections! One of them is my comic collection. Right now I'm only collecting current issues but will probably be switching over to trade paperbacks in the next year or so because I'm totally running out of room. I do have a large collection of Nightcrawler-centric back issues but I've stopped getting those for the time being also because of  (again) space issues. I need a bigger house!

And finally this leads me to the biggest and most relative collection. My dolls!

Now I have been collecting dolls in some form or another most of my life. My mother collected dolls when she was growing up. Unfortunately she doesn't have any of them left. She very kindly gave them away to a little girl she knew along time ago :) But I've been slowly giving her some of her childhood dolls back the last few years. So far I've gotten her a Ms. Beasley, a Baby Crissy, and last Christmas I got her a Velvet doll! My point here is that really you could say all of this (the dolls, the blog, the doll room!) is my mothers fault! Totally.

The first doll collection I think I had was a large collection of Cabbage Patch Kids. I had tons of them. Big ones, boys, girls, babies that smelled like powder; I even had that horse with the hair you could crimp? That thing sells for SO much on eBay now and I totally wish I had held on to it! Sadly, I only have a couple of the Cabbage Patch Kids left now.

My first one is in storage at the moment but this one:

The fact that her outfit has dinosaurs might have influenced her purchase!

Is Zara Genevieve!  I actually still remember the day I got her. She was a gift from my grandparents and after I picked her out I took her to their house so they could meet her! She came with a mail order thing to send in for a personalized book. I still have the book too, it's floating around in my bookcases right now. I was amazed at that age to have a book with my name in it!

When I was older my mother started buying me porcelain dolls. I got one every year for Christmas till I was well into college! I have a few still but they're mostly in storage. My all time favorite will probably show up here in the near future though. She's a bit of a mess and I'm planning on restoring her this year. I don't want to tell you too much about her yet but I will say that her name is Claudia and she's named after one of my all time favorite book characters!

I do have a small collection of little dolls right now. Mostly Bratzillaz and my fairy dolls! But the majority of my current doll collection is made up of American Girls/18-ish inch dolls. I won't really go into how I got started collecting these kinds of dolls right now but if you're curious and haven't read it before I talk a lot about the beginnings of my AG love affair here.

As an AG collector I mostly focus on dolls and clothes. I don't really have the room for furniture and I'd rather have more outfits anyway. In fact my girls and guys are SUCH clothes horses. I'm pretty sure they have better wardrobes than I do. Right now my the focus of my collection is on the clothes and not getting more dolls. For a long time it was doing customs and repair work, which I'm still doing, but I'm running out of space for everything (how many times have I said that this post?) and I really feel like I need to take care of what I already have! I say that but there will be a doll coming home in August. I can't wait for her!

I think there will always be a part of me that wants more dolls but I'm pretty content right now. I doubt the wanting more clothes thing will ever go away. I love dressing them! I've been collecting for a little over 4 years now and I really don't see me putting them away anytime soon. I'm lucky that I have a very supportive family and husband who don't really find this strange.

And I'm going to wrap this up here! If you've gotten this far in my rambling thank you for sticking with me. I promise that my next post is being worked on quickly and should be out sometime late this week. I'm very excited and also a little nervous about the give away but it should be fun! Till then :)