Little Miss Muffin and Mini Best Flower Buds by Jay at Play Int'l.

I was excited to begin the shopping for this blog! I got my first $50 in my hot little hands and set off for my local Toy R Us!!! It was sooooooo long since I had been to a toy store and not spent all the time in the Lego or action figure section! My 11 year old son's name is Luke Sky Walker (yes, that is how it appears on both his birth certificate and Social Security card!) so you can imagine the kind of toys I have been looking at for the past decade! I wandered over to the toddler toys (I love baby stuff!) and through the FAO Schwarz section (that was new to me!!!) and finally made it over to the doll section of the store by the time my husband had parked the car and met me inside! Lots of pink, lots of pink. I thought working at American Girl was the height of "girly-ness"! Nope, new heights! And I loved it!!!

I thought I would focus on baby dolls, since I am really into the reborn babies right now, but I didn't find a baby doll that I thought was very interesting, or worth the prices they were asking for them. There was just nothing that I would have bought for my daughters when they were little, or for my granddaughter now. They all had such unrealistic faces and either talked or did something. Baby Alive is SCARY, people!

Barbie, despite her being the captain of all the vessels bound for Christmas Island every single year of my childhood, has never been my favourite exactly. She was just the biggest, so she always ended up taking over! (She was always kind of pushy and bossy!) There are some newer, beautifully articulated fashion dolls out there though! I never liked the Monster High dolls, but, admittedly, it was because my stepdaughter did, so I never investigated them fully, being the Wicked Stepmother and all! They are incredibly creative and different! It is hard to believe that they are made by the same company that makes American Girl! I will have to investigate further.........I felt myself getting away from my purpose! I kept going back and forth, aisle to aisle.......It was around this point in time my husband informed me he was going to go back to the car to listen to the baseball game on the radio. Oops. I have to keep him on my good side. I have Epilepsy and cannot drive so who else is going to drive me on these doll-getting expeditions???

Anyway, I found some fun little goodies! Little Miss Muffin and Mini Flower Buds!

They were really cute and really inexpensive! The Muffins were on sale for $2.98 (regularly $7.98) and the little one was $2.98 regularly! (There are little muffins and larger flower pots and "Jumbo" versions of both, which are significantly more, for some reason.)

The packaging on Little Miss Muffin was very cute. It looked like a container from a bakery. Added bonus: REALLY easy to get open!!!

Pretty simple! And super cute! Before the super easy open, the box had cute details, including an open side for what it describes as the "muffin fresh scent" (I did not detect any at all. Perhaps it was because of the open window???)

The little doll has is seated in a silicone muffin cup, which has some cute graphics molded into the bottom:

The doll is sitting in the cup and her cloth body comes out, with stuffed arms and legs and head, and when you flip the silicone cup inside out, it forms the doll's body!

Now, it is true, that she can only sit there but she is a rag-type doll, so the silicone actually helps her out a lot, in that respect! She has embroidered facial details and yarn hair. The details on her dress are printed.

And the dress is printed on the back as well:

The stitching details was very even and clean through the silicone:

Here is "Miss Vanilla" coaxing "Miss Chip"out of her shell:

They look super cute together! In and out of their cups!

I was very happy to get these cuties for my grandchildren, who were coming over a few days after my toy store trip for a baking session! They made a cute decoration before the cookies got made!

I thought it was adorable that they actually came with cupcake shaped recipe cards that small children could easily make. The recipe cards are laminated so they can be wiped off and used again! They seem collectible and different characters come with different recipes!

Although I really thought this was a little unnecessary......

The little Flower Bud was made the same way as the Miss Muffins, but the stitching was sloppy and I didn't notice it before looking at these pictures but there is no mouth stitched on my Bud!

Maybe there was a little half-smile stitched there but someone definitely dropped the ball on this little flower! The packaging was easy to open but the plastic tube may have been a better choice for something that was supposedly scented. The flower was not advertised as "scented", which I thought odd. Muffins and flowers have nice smells so why would you add scent to a muffin but not to a flower? But a child could easily get the toy out of this tube after the tape was lifted.

Here are the two sizes together. The muffins are about twice the size of the "mini" flower and the "Jumbo" of both the muffins and the flowers (the size I didn't get) are about twice the size of what I am assuming is called "regular" size, since the muffins didn't have a "size" in the title. Little Miss Muffin is Little Miss Muffin, no matter what size she is!

All in all, for the price, these are very cute toys! I could see the "mini" muffins or flowers being a cute goodie for a birthday party or a prize at school! My grandchildren loved them! They were a little difficult for a four, three, and two year old to pop out all the way but they caught on and could have played "peek-a-boo" with them for quite a while if cookies weren't readily available! My four year old granddaughter sat them side by side on the floor and they were having a long conversation about something! It was sweet to watch! She made them walk around and plop down, here and there, for a stretch, dreaming up some story to go along with it! I believe that the simplest toys can be the best for young ones because they can be so very creative, given the chance! The regular size dolls were better made but to get 3 dolls for under $12 was very nice and I may get some more for stocking stuffers!

My Mission Statement! (Or, what I want this blog to accomplish.....)

I have a mission. My mission is to introduce the want-to-know public to affordable dolls before they buy them. I love dolls! I have loved dolls all my life! When I was a little girl, my room was filled with dolls and when I went anywhere, I always had a doll with me on the adventure! I think little girls grow up too fast these days and I think dolls are the answer!

But I'm not going to start singing and telling stories about a fantasy land where dolls come alive and little girls play happily without the use of cell phones or computers.....That is MY fantasy and I go there to get away from the world! I like you and all, but I'm not sure you'd like it in my head. I always knew I was a little different. When I read Johnny Gruelle's The Adventures of Raggedy Ann, I was not shocked that the dolls got up in the night and had adventures on their own! I mean, my dolls had been doing this for years! (When I found that book at our library, I thought it was sweet that someone wrote a book about "my" doll. I honestly thought that for years!) I was also born in the wrong time period. I would have been much better suited to a time when little girls had their dolls but it was up to them and their imagination to make "accessories" and "houses" for them! I was always very good at the "acorn tea cups and dandelion salad on leaf plates" sort of thing! Instead, I was born in the 60's and grew up in a time when everything was plastic. Yes, I had the Barbie Dream House but I was so much happier when The Sunshine Family came on the scene! Yes, still plastic, but more Little House On The Prairie and less Playboy Bunny!

But, inevitably, imagination would take over! The Sunshine Family would become Barbie's kids and my brother's GI Joe would join our team, and any other fashion/play doll anywhere around the same size would become part of the "family". Every year, without fail, I played a recurring game at Christmas time. My own little Advent tradition! It was called "Journey to Christmas Island"! Barbie and her extended family would be on boats (or shoe boxes or bowls, whatever!) and the storm would hit! It would be a raging sea and they would fight to survive! They would have a devastating go at the falls (the stairway) and would end up in a magical world as they landed on Christmas Island (the rug in front of the main windows in the living room where the Christmas tree was put up every year). They would gather themselves, be thankful they all survived, be thankful they didn't lose any of their accessories (every year, every single thing made it safely to the island! amazing!!!), and set up house building their shelter out of the presents under the tree. Elves would appear in the tree (I had a Tinkerbell and a couple of other elf-like dolls and some small teddy bears) and teach them about life on Christmas Island. There would be doll drama, of course, but generally, this game would keep me going all through the Christmas season! My mother was a stickler for everything looking "just right" so, looking back, I am shocked she let this game play out year after year, but I am sure it kept me out of her hair through the holiday season. Small price to pay!

Fast forward. I am a young mother of two little girls, by myself after a divorce, with very little money. One thing we did have: dolls (a lot from my childhood) and lots of imagination! I remember turning a storage closet under the eaves into a playhouse for my little daughter. A sloped, tiny space, not much good for anything else but perfect for a 5 year old to play house with her baby dolls! It fit a small chair and table, a cradle, a little set of shelves! I even strung up a light and hung pictures on the walls! There was no end to the exciting stuff you could find and re-purpose at our local Salvation Army! I started making a lot of things in those days, much more out of necessity than anything else, but I started to see the world through child-like eyes again, seeing new things where other people saw trash. I rescued broken baby dolls, I made skirts from strips of old shirts! It was fun! Money was tight but there was always something new to play with!

I am not saying we didn't save our dimes and order dolls from the Pleasant Company catalog when it came out! In fact, my daughters each had an American Girl (before they were American Girls!) and all their accessories to go along with them! But it was a game back then, saving up our pennies, then sending our order in, and getting that package in the mail! It wasn't anything like it is today! I live in Natick, MA, which is where the American Girl Boston store is located, at the Natick Mall. I even worked there for a little while. My experience doing so is another reason why I decided to write this blog. I was baffled by the indifference of many, little girls and adults alike, to AG as a toy and AG as incredibly expensive. Prices like that shouldn't be "the norm" and dolls shouldn't be "status symbols"! I know that not every family can afford to buy 16 American Girl dolls for their daughter and every single new accessory that comes out. Not everyone wants to scrimp on a part of childhood that can be oh, so special for a little girl either! And I think everyone wishes that girls weren't growing up so fast.

My mission seemed clear. I needed to find a comfortable medium. So, in this blog, I will be reviewing dolls and doll related toys that cost under $50. Every 2 weeks, or so, I will go to a national store (like Target, Wal-Mart, Toys R Us, stores that everyone has near them) and see what dolls are available for under $50. I will review baby dolls, fashion dolls, companion dolls, rag dolls and any of their "sets" or accessories. One week, I may be able to get three dolls for my $50 but other weeks, I will splurge on what might be a birthday gift or Christmas present and buy one "special" doll! I always felt lost when I was a single mom shopping for new toys at Christmas or birthdays because I was so rarely in the stores and didn't know what was new and what was a quality item! It always made me sad when I would splurge and the toy would fall short. I will review dolls in as unbiased a way as I possibly can. (I mean, this is a doll review and I love dolls!!!) I will try and keep in mind the play value and quality of the dolls I review in the age bracket they are designed for. (I know my 4 year old granddaughter is going to love putting on the "white jacket" and stepping into Gram's "laboratory" to be the "visiting scientist" as we go about doing our experiments reviews! She has already proved very, very helpful!)

I will occasionally have an "interlude" into my own doll collection. I collect all sorts of dolls! I have a wide collection of Raggedy Anns, American Girls, carved wooden Hitty dolls, reborn babies, and much more! I scrimp and save and pinch many pennies to grow my collection so these "interludes" will be few and far between, but sometimes you just get a doll you have to shout about! As I expect my readers to all (mostly) be doll enthusiasts, I think I will be granted the occasional drift into the more expensive side of doll collecting. But the fact is that there are many wonderful dolls out there that are very affordable and will provide hours of imaginative play for little girls, and the young at heart!

I welcome any input! If you have a doll you've been wondering about but don't want to buy without some more investigation, I'd be happy to help! Message me, email me, post a comment! If I can find the doll, I will review her! I am really looking forward to this little experiment of mine! I hope it will be fun to read but also be informative and helpful! That is my mission! And, yes, I accept it......