Tiny Tuesday. LOL and Merida figures

For my first Tiny Tuesday post I have a couple of little dolls that found their way into my house over Christmas. 

  First up is this Li'l Outrageous Littles doll. I had read about these online and had no interest in getting one. I don't like babies. They look like Bratz and I don't like Bratz. And in Australia they're generally priced between sixteen and twenty-five dollars. As a general rule five dollars is my limit for a blind box toy.
 But one day I had just been reading about how terribly hard to find these are and that afternoon we went shopping and they were EVERYWHERE! Target had a display of these at every single register. And almost every shop had them discounted. We ended up at Toys R Us where they were twelve dollars (by far the lowest price we'd seen) and I caved.
 I also immediately regretted it and assumed I would get whichever doll I was least likely to like, because I'm optimistic like that.

 Consequently I was pretty happy when I got the super hero baby with pigtails! Probably the only one that I was going to be completely happy with. Having said that, there's no chance I would buy abother one of these. Ninety-nine percent of the fun is in opening the packaging and they really are over-priced for what they are. I'm pretty sure if they were in blister packs there's no way they'd be more than ten dollars.

  Next is a Tomy buildable Disney Princess figure. Another blindbag item but at four dollars, far more reasonably priced. She's got a look that reminds me of the Funko-Pop dolls but she's still instantly recognisable as Merida. Her dress is actually a lot greener than it turned out in the picture. I was really pleased with this one. I bought her and a Frozen blindbag from the same range at the same time. Then I looked at the packaging and realised that out of the figures offered, unless I got Merida and Elsa, I was going to be disappointed. Luckily I got Merida and Elsa! (Sadly Elsa has since been kidnapped by the Giant Baby and I can't find her.)

Finally I got this Jakks Pacific Merida mini doll. These dolls are about three and a half inches tall and while the Frozen ones seemed to be everywhere last year, I've only seen the other princesses once. I chose Merida because she's hilariously awful.
 I would call this look 1980's country music prom queen. Not Merida. It looks nothing like her. Her little box had a LOT to say about her being posable. Um . . . Ok.
 My issue with that is that all of her plastic hair makes her head almost impossible to turn. It also gets in the way if you try to lift her arms. And if you do manage to lift her arms?

Suddenly her arms are growing out of her waist! I'm pretty sure that's not actually how anatomy works. On top of this the full extent of movement in her legs is this -

The poor girl can't even sit down! I actually love this doll, because she is so incredibly terrible. I think that might be weird. And now every time we go shopping I'm searching for these just so I can see if the other princesses are this bad. But so far I haven't spotted them again.

*The pictures in this post were taken on my phone and the whole post was written on my phone so I apologise if the pictures and formatting are slightly rubbish.

Adventures of a Giant Baby

The Giant Baby and I have had an exciting week. . . and not all in a good way.
 Last week he started daycare. He's only going to be going one day a week and it's mostly for the social aspect. He gets to get used to spending time with adults that he's not related to and he gets to play with other kids without me having to socialise. That possibly sounds horrible but I'm just not a social person. When I get the chance, and I don't very often, I'd much rather invest in some alone time. So far he seems to love it and I'm actually really impressed with the centre and he's already trying to talk more so I feel like I've done the right thing.
 Then on Thursday night we were outside running around and he tripped. He had a dummy in his mouth and he landed on it. It cut up the inside of his mouth and pushed his two front teeth back up into his gum. There was screaming and crying (and not all from him) and a LOT of blood and a rushed visit to the doctors before they closed. The doctor's attitude was "Ack, he'll be fine, stop freaking out." which was equally comforting and insulting.
 I also discovered that even though I know first aid and know from experience that I'm great in an emergency, the sight of a single drop of blood from the Giant Baby turns me into a puddle.
 Saturday night the baby had a fever of forty degrees. We tried to find a doctor, but the only one we could find that was open was already overbooked and told us to go to the emergency room. We were there until a million o'clock when he was given the all clear.
 But Saturday and Sunday he cried all night. We gave him ibuprofen before bed and even still he spent half the night crying. Except it was this terrible crying where he would try to get up or get away but he wasn't actually awake. He couldn't even open his eyes. It's not easy comforting a child that isn't even aware you're there.
 Because he'd been so miserable, he went to the dentist yesterday, just to check that everything is fine and that his baby teeth getting pushed back didn't damage his adult teeth. Luckily his adult teeth are fine and while not everything is quite where it should be, nothing is actually where it REALLY shouldn't be. It's just a case of waiting another week and a half for it to heal. I had mixed feelings when I heard this. On the one hand Yay! It's all ok! On the other hand it may be another week and a half before I get to sleep through the night again. Not so yay.
 But actually he did sleep through last night although he's still clearly not a hundred percent (he just spent five minutes crying over a puddle.) At least things are looking up.

Meanwhile in doll related news, I've decided to start a weekly series of posts called Tiny Tuesday, showcasing the little toys (up to four inches) and dollhouse miniatures in my collection. Hopefully I can get the first one up by tonight, otherwise I'm going to cheat and post it tomorrow on the grounds it's still Tuesday in America.

A Strange Christmas Story (sort of)

Somehow I seem to end up doing weird things at work.
 Most of the weird stuff started with this guy

We all started making snowmen out of left over blu-tack. I have no idea why but we did. One day the manager saw that day's snowman and tried to be cross about it. The girl that was working tried to distract him by pointing out what a great snowman it was. He replied that he wasn't impressed by a snowman. He would be impressed by a full nativity scene made from blu-tack.
Challenge accepted.

Even though it was July, I spent the next week making a nativity scene out of blu-tack. Some of it was the standard stuff, some of the coloured stuff, some was a different brand that made it in white. Most of it was dyed with markers. It changed as I made it. Initially it was planned as something far more ambitious looking like cast resin figures but blu-tack doesn't work like that. (Although I suspect if I'd made blocks, chilled them and carved them it could almost have but I'm probably kidding myself) The figures ended up being far more naive in style and were going to have details added with markers when I was finished. Except by the time I had finished shaping them, I was so sick of the whole idea, I didn't bother.

It's changed since then. The characters all wore costumes for Halloween (although I don't have pictures of that) and this little guy joined them

They all changed back for Christmas and the ghost disappeared. Since then they've been joined by a Littlest Petshop cat and several different Kinder Surprise toys have come and gone. There's also a cake now that I made when two of the girls at work had birthdays

And an ice cream sundae from another work mate's birthday. Baby Jesus went missing and was replaced with a new, rather unhealthy looking baby made from normal blu-tack, who apparently laid an egg for some reason.

My current project is weird. One of the girls at work is named Tam and one day we joked that her My Little Pony name was Tamponia. So now because I have a mental image of this and the maturity level of a fifteen year old boy, I've got a little blind bag My Little Pony figure that I'm repainting to be Tamponia. It's not going to be overtly gross because frankly my brain couldn't deal with that, but it's definitely not going to be tasteful either so it will probably never make an appearance here.

Plans

My plan to do "My stuff" for an hour after the baby goes to bed has come to nothing so far. I've been working a lot more than usual which means I get home at ten or eleven at night and I'm not working on anything then, generally I've been up since six am and all I want is my dinner. And if I did try to do anything in that state, I'd muck it up.

Not quite so cute when it's three AM and he's screaming the house down!

Also the Giant Baby has stopped sleeping. The mothercraft nurse says this is normal and it's called two-year sleep regression and will go away on it's own. I'm not completely sold on that idea. His Dad puts him to bed when I'm working, but if he's making any noise at all after that his Dad gets him back up again. I'm pretty sure this has become a bad habit and now he expects to be gotten out of bed if he wakes up at all.

Despite all this, in the delusion that I'll eventually get five minutes to myself I'm making a list of stuff that I want to get done. Not a big list because I want to do EVERYTHING but I'm not putting everything on the list - it's extremely short and prioritised; and there's no time limit. I'll finish when I finish, then I can make a new list.

Dress fitting for Not-Glinda. Nearly done. At the moment see-sawing

between Grace and Charlotte as her name.

First I want to finish the things I've started. Finish Not-Glinda's dress and finally give her a name, fix one Baby So Beautiful's hair. The other Baby So Beautiful still needs a dress. The My Child dress she's wearing fits ridiculously badly, but her new dress is on hold until I think of something I want to make her instead of forcing myself to make something that I don't want to make.

Her collar sticks up weirdly and I'm not completely happy with how full her fringe is,

but at least she doesn't look like her face is melting anymore.

I want to look at making a light tent for photographing dolls and things. At the moment this is sounding like a fairly simple process but it still remains to be seen if it is or not.

I have a Dollmore Zihu.

The bad lighting here makes her look a tiny bit alien

 I've had her for a few years now. I gave her a face-up when she arrived. And I love her more than nearly anything. But I still haven't made any clothes for her. I still haven't settled on which wig is hers. I bought a wig specially for her and it really doesn't suit her but I have two others that I quite like on her. Mostly she needs clothes.

I also got an Iplehouse KID for Christmas.

I'm not happy with her eyes but I think I'm happy with her wig. . . maybe

 She needs clothes too. And I have to decide which wig is hers.

Put away in a cupboard in our laundry is a charming young lady named "Miss Three-Head".

She's never even been unwrapped!

She's a lutz doll with two extra heads that I bought not long after I got my Zihu. She doesn't have any face-up yet. I haven't even unwrapped her and have completely forgotten which of the Luts heads she has! Two of the heads have no eyes. And I have no wigs that will fit her. I know that I had plans for her, when I bought her. I have NO idea now what those plans were. I'm not even going to say that I have to do anything with her just now. But I do have to decide WHAT I'm going to do with her. Have some vague idea at least.


Lastly in my dollhouse I have a library. With some lovely bookshelves.

Lovely empty bookshelves

And a grand total of maybe six books. I want to make some books for the dollhouse. I'm talking about making some book covers in Photoshop, printing them out and gluing them to blocks of craftwood. Not any ambitious miniature bookbinding of actual readable miniature books for me!

And of course continue to amass a collection of ridiculous and creepy Shopkins Happy Places toys, that just keep getting weirder.