Tiny Tuesday - My Mini Mixie Qs

This is an accidental collection. How do you get an accidental collection? Well, when these were first released I bought a couple of the blindbag packs. I was happy with them. I liked them. But they didn't really do anything for me, so I had no intention of buying more. But because I had them, the Giant Husband bought me some more, and more, and more. I was actually quite surprised to see how many I've accumulated.

Mini Mixie Qs are Mattel's contribution to the blingbag toy plague. They're tiny (seriously minuscule) blocky figures and accessories that look kind of pixelated. They're sold in blingbag packs of two, or in packs of several figures sometimes with extra clothes and hair pieces, or in sets with playsets. They have hard plastic wigs and clothing that can be removed and swapped around.

Figure with hair and dress

Some of the outfits are quite plain

Others have tiny attached accessories

And some are even fancier

The multi packs either have one or two figures with lots of extra outfits and hair or a few themed dolls with maybe an accessory or two

Some of the playsets fold up into cubes, others are stackable. 

I have a candy store

And a toy store. The toy store came with more accessories than actually fit inside the store. It also came with extra clothes and wigs (That I didn't photograph because I forgot about them until just now.)

These are actually really cute. (My camera didn't agree! I had a hard time getting it to focus on them at all.) But I think they're more of a novelty than a toy. They're just too small to comfortably play with and once you have the playsets are set up, if anyone so much as breathes near them, all of the teeny tiny accessories fall over and are lost forever!

My favourites are definitely the pink ninja girl and the little dog figure.

Tiny Tuesday - Baby Secrets

 These dolls turned up in our supermarket last week. Little blind bag babies, that come packed in bathtubs. For some reason I felt compelled to check them out. The display they're in, in the store, has a couple of shelves of the bathtubs (each with one doll) and larger packs with two visible dolls, one blind bag doll in a bath, and an accessory. Initially I planned on getting one bathtub and one of the accessory packs. But the only accessory packs left in stock had a highchair which, frankly looked like something from the two dollar shop. I couldn't bring myself to spend sixteen dollars on it, so I got two of the blind bags instead.

 The name Baby Secrets unreasonably irritates me. When I was a kid, I had this doll. . .

named Baby Secrets. And in my head, that doll will always be Baby Secrets and the nine year old that lives in the back of my head is annoyed at her doll's name being stolen.

Anyway, the cover art on the packages, shows extremely cute babies but from the ones I saw in the accessory sets, I had a feeling these dolls weren't going to be as cute. To be honest, lately there is such a proliferation of blind bag toys on the market, that sometimes I wonder if A) The toys that get blind bagged would sell at all if people could see what they were getting (I have an inkling most wouldn't), and B) Whether toy companies think they can sell any piece of rubbish they like by putting it in a blind bag. (I'm pretty sure they do.)

 The first thing you get when you unwrap the bathtub is the obligatory checklist. Dolls on one side. Accessory packs on the other. The checklist makes a big deal about there being 50 dolls. Strictly speaking there are 25. 15 standard blind bag dolls. 1 limited edition furry blind bag doll (That is a total Twosies rip-off). 8 dolls that are exclusive to the accessory packs. And 1 Sparkle blind bag doll, that you can only get in the accessory packs. But each of the dolls has a nappy that changes from white to pink or blue in cold water, so if you have one of each doll in each gender, that's 50 dolls. Except I only ever seem to get girls in things like this, and I can't picture parents being willing to shell out for multiples of each accessory set on the off chance of maybe getting a boy.

Next there's a "Birth Certificate" to fill out. Being an adult, I'm not overly interested in this but it's exactly the sort of thing I would've eaten up with a spoon as a child.

Finally there's a baby in a plastic bag. And wow, they're a lot creepier in real life, than they are in the cartoon artwork! Here are the two I got.

I have to say, I much prefer the one in the ski goggles. Partly because the idea of going skiing in just a nappy, woollen hat, and goggles is just bizarre. I've never been skiing but I'm guessing that if it's cold enough to snow, you probably want to be wearing clothes. But I mostly prefer that one because the goggles cover the face.

All that was left, was to find out if they were girls or boys. The checklist says to dip them in cold water. Whenever anything says to dip something in cold water, I always try putting it in the freezer first. Usually works better and I'm less likely to spill anything. But the freezer didn't work on these two. At all. So I did dip them in cold water and surprise, surprise, they were both girls.

These babies are jointed at the arms and legs and neck. But the heads are difficult to turn and don't turn very far. And after bending and straightening the baby's leg a few times, it started to look like this. . .

I don't know if you can see the little crumbs around the joint of her left leg, but that's plastic, not paint. And given I had only worked that joint maybe three times, that's some pretty shoddy workmanship.

Overall, these dolls seem to me more like a product that would've been for sale in a two dollar shop twenty years ago, than something that would be sold now. They're not very cute at all, their paint is sloppy, their construction is shoddy and the overall impression that I get is that these have been thrown into the market in an attempt to cash in on the popularity of the Li'l Outrageous Littles and Twosies. Except they completely lack the charm of the other two. And given that the company that makes these is actually the Australian distributor for a lot of MGA toys (including the LOLs), these would really annoy me if I was MGA. Surely developing a product that's in direct competition to a product that you distribute is at best a pretty jerky thing to do!

 It's toys like these that make me sick of blind bag toys.

And now the bad news . . .

The Giant Baby had his hearing test. Leading up to it, I didn't think about it too much. I kept thinking back to a year ago when he discovered that he could see trains from our backyard if someone picked him up. As soon as the boom gates started making noise, he would ask to be picked up, even though half the time I couldn't even hear them. I didn't realise he hasn't done that in a very long time or that now he only asks to watch the trains if one toots.

 He did not do well on the hearing test at all. But they couldn't draw any conclusions from it either, because it turned out he had an ear infection when they did the test. He has to do a second test but not until the end of July.
 I finally looked up some information on hearing problems in toddlers and now I feel terrible. So many things we just took for granted as being cute or even clever are actually more likely signs he hasn't been hearing properly for a while now.
 For the last few months he's been developing his own sign language. Nothing ridiculously sophisticated. In fact it's pretty basic stuff. If he's thirsty, he'll bring me a book open to a picture of a drink and point to it, then point to the kitchen. If he wants to watch something on television, he will bring me a toy or book from the show he wants and then point to the dvd player. That kind of thing.
 We thought he was so very clever because he could tell us what he wanted without even trying to verbalise it. (Unless we say no, he verbalises his displeasure with that pretty darn effectively.) It didn't even occur to us that the fact that he wasn't even trying out new words was probably a bad sign.
 I also feel particularly terrible because after seeing the audiologist, we went tothe doctor and it turns out his ear infection is so bad, he has blisters on his ear drum! That sounds incredibly painful to me, but I didn't even know that he had an ear infection. Although in all fairness, I've been watching him like a hawk since then and I swear that he has shown absolutely no sign of having an ear infection.
 So, he's on the waiting list for speech therapy, and he has another hearing test booked. At this point we're fairly certain there is going to be an issue with his hearing and are praying that it's something that can be solved with ear tubes or grommets. Yes, that will require surgery but it's also temporary and fixable so definitely preferable to something permanent or unfixable.

Because of all this, I've been having far too much fun making various appointments and beating myself up about this to do anything doll related this last week. And on top of that, one of the ladies that I work with had emergency surgery on Monday and now I'm covering a lot of her shifts. So for the forseeable future, I am working every night until I have a complete breakdown, then probably sobbing in a corner for a few days at least, before I can even think about doing anything worth posting about.

 To make things even more fun, I also messed up the other day and the baby finally got his Shirley Temple curls cut off. Basically, since the weather has turned cold  (so very bloody cold!) his curls have been fairly limp and frizzy and tangly and his fringe has been in his eyes most of the time. I decided to trim his fringe which I've done heaps of times. Except he wouldn't sit still and it was uneven and looked funny. So he finally got the haircut his dad has been begging for. Now he looks like a little blonde Ginnifer Goodwin. I'm hoping I'll be able to talk his dad into letting his curls grow back for next Summer but that may be beyond my powers.