When I was really little, my mom would occasionally bring home a stuffed animal after work. And since she was a single mom, she was gone a lot and I had a lot of stuffed animals.
I would cuddle the dolls at night and carry them around during the day. Most often, though, I would play with the lot of them in one sitting.
Little me would sort the plush toys by color, species, or texture - and take note of the variety of dolls that I had accrued. It looked something like:
4 bears, 3 ducks, 2 dogs, 1 rabbit, 1 turtle;
5 brown, 3 white, 2 yellow, 1 rainbow;
9 furry, 2 nylon
Back then I would mentally tally them up and assign a personal value to each one. When I got bored with that I would examine the different features and how the dolls were put together. Take for example the typical teddy bear: plastic eyes, stitches for mouth, cylindrical limbs, and a seam down the middle of its belly. I would also set them up to depict life-like scenes, but more often I would bunch the whole gang into one big congregation.
Just before I started kindergarten, my mom had settled and the income of dolls had slowed way down. I noticed I had too many to keep track anymore and soon lost interest. Instead I started making real-life friends and learning how to read.
A few months later one of my sisters was born. This time I would use the dolls to entertain the baby - making them sing, dance, and talk to her. Sometimes I would make a little nest out of the plushies and lay the infant inside it. She would eventually play with them herself and do the same things I did while my attention diverted to barbies and Nintendo games. As the years went by, the impressive doll collection was going more and more unnoticed; cartoons and video games were becoming so much cooler.
By the time my youngest sister joined the family, our fuzzy friends were getting lost, tossed, or given away. I managed to hold onto one of my favorites for over 20 years - a raccoon that I named Rocky. Not after the movie.
