I was in denial for a while, but I've now come to realise that Bella is collecting Blythe dolls. There are seven of them now - Bessie, Rosey, Mabel, Hazel, Emily-Jane, Alice and her first doll, Ruby. Oh yes, I do know them all by name and look out if I occasionally get a name mixed up. Three of them have been totally funded by Bella herself - birthday & saved up pocket money. The other four have been gifts from us - x2 Christmas, x1 birthday and a weak moment when we bought the first one, just because.
I'm not going to lie, these dolls aren't cheap - but they've been worth every cent. They're all constantly played with and I do mean constantly! After school and weekends you can find Bella dressing them up, changing their dolly house around, creating Blythe clothes + accessories and chatting with her little blogging friends about them.
There's also lots of planning & writing involved - doing the maths on how many weeks of pocket money a certain doll would cost, writing ever changing lists about which Blythe is high priority (ie. next on the want list), writing Blythe stories, blog posts, problem solving how to make clothes that fit over the doll's head (it's big!)and so much more.
We do have other collections in our family too - stickers, erasers, Star Wars, miniature Ferrari cars, vintage cameras, babushka dolls and I think Rich is collecting used dirt bike tyres in the shed - haha!
I once found a book on really cool things that people collect and I'm so cross with myself for not buying it at the time - and now I can't remember the name of it. Arghhh.
Do you or your children have a collection that just kind of happened over night? Ka-boom! In the blink of an eye, you realised that it was maybe getting a little out of control? Please share, I'd love to know.
