I saw a reference today to something called NaBloPoMo (short for National Blog Post Month, I believe) where there is a challenge to write on your blog every day for a month. Since that is something I’d like to try to do, I’m going to try to do it.

Yay for effort!

I found a list of prompts to work from and I’m already a day behind. So let’s do this thing.

Day 1: What was the one toy that a friend had that you wished you had when you were little?

I was a little girl of the 70s (don’t do any math with that fact, please). I don’t actually remember a friend having one, but I remember being really quite desperate to have Baby Alive come live at my house. I am pretty sure this was after my parents had gifted me with my very own baby brother, who I was kind of desperate to NOT have living at my house.

I like him a lot better now.

Baby Alive was SO COOL. She actually ate fake food, chewing it with her creepy (in retrospect) little plastic mouth. She actually peed. She actually (stage whisper) pooped. I mean, could she be any cooler?

My parents were equally, if not more, desperate for me NOT to have a creepy looking eating, peeing, and pooping doll. Probably because they had an actual eating, peeing, and pooping baby and didn’t have time for such nonsense. Possibly also because of the fact that there were reported cases of the insides of Baby Alive going moldy and toxic due to the clearly imperfect technology involved in making a doll mimic digestion.

I put her on my Christmas list. I probably begged A LOT for her.

All I wanted in my young life was Baby Alive.

Christmas rolled around and I opened my presents. I don’t remember what they were, I was probably 6 or 7 (although my memory is not so great so who knows, I might have been 8 or 9 or 12 – it all blends together).  I’m sure it was all great 70s kid stuff.

But no Baby Alive. Boo.

After everything was opened, my folks did that dramatic “Wait, I think there is one more present for you over there in the corner” thing.

Yay!

So I went and got the (strangely large) box that was almost as tall as me. This seemed like a blatant overpackaging situation for a doll that was the size of a real baby. Maybe she came with a LOT of diapers to cover the whole peeing and pooping situation?

I ripped the box open excitedly. And in the (appropriate sized) box was a huge doll, as big as me. And if you held her hands she…walked.

Wrong doll. Wrong simulated bodily function.

People didn’t say WTF back then, and I was a child, so I wouldn’t have known to say it anyway. But I still thought it.

Little kid curse words flew through my mind. Crushing disappointment. Tears. Wailing.

Mom and Dad were bewildered at my reaction. Maybe they didn’t realize that Baby Alive was a specific sort of doll that was a very specific kind of fake alive? Maybe they did. Maybe they thought I wouldn’t notice the difference. Walking is ALMOST the same as pooping.

Just ask my dog, she is similarly confused about these things.

Suffice it to say, Baby Alive never came to live with me. And I never really took to The Walking Doll. She was always “the bad one” when I played. The one that had to sit in a corner and think about what she had done. She and Raggedy Ann were always up to no good. Jerks.

Baby Alive came out with a revamp in the 2000s, and strangely I did not feel any need to acquire her for my then-small children. I mean, who wants a doll that chews (ew) and pees (yuck) and poops (gross). That’s a completely terrible idea for a kids toy.

A walking doll would be a lot more fun, right?

Well played, Mom and Dad.