Time for the January update on my 40th year project. Woo hoo!

This month I started digging into the box of super-special-save-forever treasures that I packed up and sent to California when I helped my parents move out of my childhood home several years ago. Though my parents had made changes to my room in the 15 years since I moved out to attend college, the closet and my huge desk were still packed with my stuff. Toys, papers, notebooks, tchotchkes  – you name it, I saved it. I did my best to clear everything out because I didn’t want to saddle my parents or myself with all my junk so the stuff that went into the box is the creme de la creme. Going through this box is very intense for me because literally every piece of paper in it has some kind of significance in my life. So far I’ve only managed to excavate 2 inches into it! You’ll see a lot more of these historical documents as I add them into my album in the coming months.

Let’s take a look at what I put together:

This page shows:

• I little bit about my love for tea. I really like tea.
• A photo and a smidge about my life from my freshman year of college.
• I great quote from Ira Glass about mastering creative pursuits. These are words I revisit frequently. (Found on Pinterest.)
• Rob Lowe, my teenage crush. I totally forgot how much I loved Rob Lowe until I found the photo of my bedroom in the lower left corner of this page and saw all the posters of him on the walls. He does nothing for me now, though. Isn’t that weird?
• A sparkly photo of myself I took using Incredibooth.
• A photo of my room from when I was in 9th grade. It was definitely NOT this clean normally. I think I took the photo specifically because it was so tidy.

I also included a going away card that my co-workers made me when I left my first post-college job in an 8.5 x 11 page protector. Lots of funny messages with inside jokes inside there.

The back of that page protector has a layout I made after asking Wyatt and Augie a bunch of questions about me. Their answers cracked me up and I realized they think my job is laundress. Nice.

The second side of this layout has:

• A picture of me with much longer hair than I have now.
• A bracelet that I found in the basement when we moved last year.
• My typical morning routine.
• A couple things about my love of books.
• A bit about my childhood relationship with NyQuil (Blech!) and the lengths I went to to avoid taking it.
• A picture of my awesome Sharp boom box.
• And a photo of me on my 21st birthday.

This next spread incorporates both the divided page protectors and a full sized 12×12 page.

The right side has:

• A photo of my goofing around in my first real grown-up lady apartment.
• A card that was thrown out into the audience when I went to a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in high school.
• A print-out of the box from my all time most favorite LEGO set.
• A note on my chances of surviving a zombie apocalypse. (Slim.)
• Stickers from my trip to Disney World when I was 8 that I never stuck onto anything. There’s a Minnie Mouse one behind the Mickey you see there, too.
• A photo of my Grandma Ruby and all her kids.
• And a picture of the first gingerbread house I ever made.

The opposite page holds a report card from 6th grade and my 7th grade ITBS test results.

The back side of that page holds a Mills College admissions office brochure about student life. My roommates and I were interviewed and photographed for the brochure.

And finally, the last page includes these little tidbits:

• A photo and ticket stub from a trip to Minnesota I took with my friend Gretchen for an Iowa football game.
• A photo and quote from Amy Poehler that I like.
• All you’ve ever wanted to know about my feelings for orange pop.
• My 7th grade class schedule.
• More about zombies!

And finally, in honor of the Martin Luther King holiday, I’ll leave you with an insipid poem I wrote in sixth grade that was inspired by his famous and much more eloquent speech:

A Dream by Wendy Thorpe

I have a dream!
I have a dream for peace on earth,
No nuclear bombs, and jobs for all.
I have a dream that Mr. Chauvinist and Ms. Prejudice are dead,
Laying in their coffins.
I have a dream of flowering shrubs.
Trees in blossom, and grass swaying in the breeze.
What I dream is a beautiful picture,
No hospitals, just health,
No poverty, just wealth.
I have a dream.

Flowering shrubs, ladies and gentlemen! Flowering shrubs.

I’m still working on my big 40th year album and it’s time to give you update #4! I’ve been having a ton of fun doing this project. I know I say that every time I give an update, but it’s true! I find memories are triggered by tiny little things — conversations with my kids, photos I find in boxes, random links on the internet. And approaching it one story at a time makes it feel manageable.

Here’s what I’ve been working on the past few weeks:

This page tells these stories:

• A photo of me from a few months ago
• A print-out of a Miss Piggy poster that I had hanging on the wall of my bedroom through most of elementary school (triggered, of course, by the new Muppet movie)
• A bit about my fairly unusual name
• A photo of my friends and me when we were on the high school track team
• A photo of me with my lovely cousin, Jessica
• My mom and dad
• The story of my love for Amelia Peabody books

The other side of the layout was filled with this stuff:

• A photo of me in front of one of the Great Pyramids. I accidentally wrote the journaling card that explains this photo in a vertical format when the photo slot was horizontal, but it was no biggie — I just slipped it in sideways. No stress.
• Next to that there’s a photo of me in the only suit I’ve ever owned.
• A postcard of my all time favorite kind of candy, only available in England
• A picture of my with my aunt and uncle
• A photo of me in LA taken the year after Zach and I got married.

This spread is a little different because I made a special 6×12 inch layout and stuck it in the middle. The left side shows:

• A photo of me from the years where I died my hair red all the time.
• One of me with my prom date
• A truly fantastic photo of my brother, cousin and me sledding. I’m making a horrible face and our winter clothes are of a beautiful early 80′s vintage.
• A photo I took with Cookie Monster and Elmo at BlogHer this year.

I had a few 5×7′s portraits from my bigger roles in high school plays that wouldn’t fit in the slots in the page protectors I’m using so I made this simple layout to include them and talk about my time doing drama as an extra-curricular activity. You can see the front and the back in the image above.

The other side of this page includes:

• A photo of me with memorable college friend — this was a little tag I made for a mini album that I never finished a few years ago.
• A list of things I’m thankful for. On Thanksgiving day I posted a sentence or two about things I was thankful for on Facebook every few hours. Afterwards I copied them all into photoshop and added in a few more to include in this book.
• A photo of me with a couple of friends I hung out with the summer between high school and college.
• A cute 10 year old photo of me and Zach
• A little bit about how I’m nosy and enjoy watching my neighbors. Judge me if you must, but I find people interesting!

This last layout is another one where I inserted a bigger item in a page protector.

The left side holds:

• A valentine Zach made me a few years ago
• My student ID from college
• A photo I found of the bulletin board in my bedroom that I took some time during my junior year of high school.
• A picture of the cook book bookshelf in our living room. I have a bit of a problem.
• A story about how I slept on a waterbed for my entire childhood.
• An Incredibooth photo I took last month.

I made the bulletin board and cook book journaling cards using Project Life Cobalt collection digital journaling cards. I bought the cards from the Clementine collection too, and I like those so much that I think I’m going to buy the paper version of the collection to use in this album. I think I’m going to do a Project 365 album again next year after taking a break in 2011, so I’ll use them in that album too.

The insert is some paperwork from my pregnancy with Augie. Early on, a test result came back showing that he had a chromosomal trisomy. After many more tests, it was determined to be a false alarm — thank goodness — but it was a time of my life that was totally and completely horrible. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me to look at this, but I have to include some of these things in order to paint a full picture of what my life has been like. The back side of this shows more of the paperwork.

The final page has this stuff:

• A photo with my brother when I was 3 and he was 6
• My favorite way to eat mac and cheese — with tuna and peas
• Princess Leia as Rosie the Riveter which is awesome in so very many ways
• A bit about my love for Christmas socks
• A few scraps of paper I found in a box — ticket stubs for Weezer and Beck concerts and a poem my aunt included with a Christmas gift many years ago.
• And finally, the neon sign for the bar my friends and I went to pretty much every weekend when we were in our mid-20′s.

Interested in seeing more of this project? Check out these other posts:

• My 40th Year Project
• Update: 40th Year Project
• 40th Year Project: Part 3
• 40th Year Project: Part 4

I love decking out our living room with all sorts of holiday swag, but the decorations that bring me the most joy are our Christmas tree ornaments. I think themed trees are beautiful, but for me the best ornaments are sentimental. I’ve been collecting our ornaments little by little for years and I try to select each one for a specific reason. A wagon for Wyatt because he loved his Radio Flyer so much. A trike for Augie the year he learned to ride. That sort of thing.

It makes me so happy to unpack each ornament and remember a little something about our family as I hold it in my hand. I like to tell my kids the stories as we work on the tree and I think they enjoy hearing them too. Here are a few of my favorites:

Fimo Santa

Back when I was single and living by myself, I had lots and lots of time for crafting. In 1996 I made everyone in my family Santa ornaments out of Fimo. The face was cut from a carefully assembled millefiori face cane and then I added the hat and beard. I made something like 15 of these and it took me weeks!

Sparkly Pyramid

This is one of the ornaments I made for my very first Christmas tree. I bought a four foot tree from the drugstore near my house and dragged it home across a super busy street because I didn’t have a car to strap it to! This ornament is modeled after a similar one that my parents have on their Christmas tree that they made for their first Christmas together.

Paper Clay Hand-prints

I made these hand-print ornaments for the boys’ first Christmases. I made quarter inch thick rounds out of paper clay, inked each kid’s hand up with red ink and then pressed them into the clay. After they were set, I stamped their names and the dates with tiny little letter stamps. These make me feel all gushy inside.

Spock Ornament

Zach and I bought this Spock ornament at the Star Trek exhibit in Las Vegas shortly before we were married. We went with a big group of our friends and had an excellent fun time. To say that Zach likes Spock is an understatement, so the choice to get this one was a no-brainer.

Tin Toy Flying Saucer

This is one from our very first married Christmas! Again we chose this one because of Zach’s love of aliens. The legs retract when you pull on the string to hang it up.

Camel Ornament

I bought this one a few years after my trip to Egypt to remind me of…er…my trip to Egypt. Yeah, it would have probably had a little more sentimental value if I’d actually bought it in the market in Cairo, but not every ornament has to has to be purchased in the time associated with it. I’ve decided I can assign sentiment to objects after the fact too.

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This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Sears. The opinions and text are all mine.

At some point in junior high or high school, I became really interested in learning how to sew with my mom’s sewing machine. My mom took the time to walk me through the basics of how to use it, but she didn’t have much time to spare beyond that, so she set me loose to learn on my own. When I asked her for a place to start, she told me, “I learned to sew by making Barbie clothes. Why don’t you experiment by making some doll clothes?” So, armed with a bag of fancy scrap fabrics and a couple of glamorous 80′s Barbies, I set to work.

Most of the clothes I made at first were glorified tubes. Who am I kidding? Just about all of the clothes I made were tubes! But after awhile I got bored, so I started to jazz my tubes up with some interesting details. Let’s take a look at some of the fancier outfits:

This was my first foray into applique (though at the time I didn’t know that’s what it was called). I cut a rectangle of yellow taffeta along with a bunch of random geographic shapes. Then I meticulously turned the edges of shapes under using my fingers (No iron! Yikes!) and machine sewed them onto the rectangle. I finished the skirt off by sewing it into a tube and then made a little boat neck top to go along with it.

This next outfit seems to be the project I used to teach myself about ruffles and pleats. the skirt is a simple tube (see? I told you!) with a wide ruffle added to the bottom. I’m pretty sure I had a skirt like this at the time.  The top is a boxy v-neck with a quarter inch pleat all along the bottom. I finger-pleated this baby, too! No iron! Look at me with my crazy self.

This sequined mini skirt is a very special tube. Why is it so special? Because I hand-sewed every freaking one of those sequins on that skirt, that’s why! It took me forever. I worked on it for a few minutes every night after I finished my homework and I did a fabulous job, if I do say so myself. Granted, it hasn’t been handled very much in the mean time, but 25+ years later not a single sequin has fallen off. That, my friends, is quality craftsmanship! It is also the reason why I’ve never sewn a sequin on any garment since then.

And finally, I want to show you how I loosened garments that were too tight to fit over Barbie’s excessively wide hips. (Kidding!) Instead of measuring Barbie and the fabric as I was cutting dresses out, I always just eyeballed everything. So sometimes after I finished a dress it didn’t quite fit and I couldn’t get it on the doll. Usually I didn’t leave enough seam allowance to let anything out, so instead of discarding the dress,  I just attacked it with a seam ripper. This gold lame number  — so very pretty and reminiscent of Solo in the Spotlight from the front — needed it’s seam ripped in an unfortunate place.

Poor Barbie! How embarrassing!

How did you learn to sew? Did you make clothes for your dolls? Did you ever inadvertently make them look like sex workers like I did?

Remember last month how I told you I was going to make a special project for my 4oth year? Well, I’ve been busily working on it and I thought it was time to give you an update on my progress. I’ve been jotting down notes about stories I want to add to this book as I think of them, digging through boxes and adding bits and pieces here and there for the last month. I’m not really working on it every day like I’d hoped I would, but I’m still pretty happy with how much I’ve accomplished already.

Here are the pages I’ve completed:

This page has:

• a photo of me with my second cousin when I visited Europe in 1997 and a little story about a song I heard everywhere on that trip.
• an essay about my Starbucks problem
• a photo of me with braids in Hawaii a few years ago (I alway braid my hair on vacation when my hair is long enough)
• a picture of my feet from this summer
• a story about winning the book fair costume contest when I was Wyatt’s age (I’ve gotta find the picture that goes with it)
• a self portrait from earlier in the month.

UPDATE: After my dad saw this blog post, he dug out a picture of me in my Cat in the Hat costume and sent it to me, so I slipped that into the photo above the journaling card:

Man, I sure was cute! (And kind of surly looking.)

On this page:

• stuff about tomatoes
• a few recent Facebook status updates
• a note about one of my favorite end-of-the-day activities
• an insert from one of the series 5 Lego minifigs I bought recently
• a love letter to my mixer
• and a postcard from Iowa, my homeland.

One thing I’ve found as I’m working on this book: it’s way easier to find vertically-oriented things to stick in the pockets than it is to find horizontally oriented stuff. A lot of the printable cards and journaling prompts and most of the photos of myself that I’ve found are vertical so I’ve had to go out of my way to take horizontal photos and create journaling blocks in the landscape configuration.

Here are some more detailed photos of the pages above:

Here you can see:

• a photo of my messy desk.
• a bit about an album that was part of the soundtrack to my young adulthood and some of the memories that brings back
• the back of the Lego insert
• a photo of my new haircut
• a list of my favorite beverages
• some stuff about my besties who are far away.

And finally this page has:

• a bit about letterboxing and the stamp I carved last night
• a photo of me drinking a huge vodka and orange juice on my 19th birthday (shhhhh!) — this was one of a stack of tags I made a few years ago that was intended to be made into a sort of mini-version of this book. It was a little too small for the pocket, so I mounted it on a piece of coordinating paper and slipped that in the pocket. I’ll be adding the rest of these pages in too.
• a few little notes about my childhood nickname, my senior photo and my husband coming home from a trip
• a list of suggested pre-college reading that I tackled my pre-college summer. I highlighted all the books I read on the list as I completed them and kept at it all through college. Sad fact: I’ve only crossed two books off this list since I graduated in 1994!
• a photo of my best friends and me at our high school graduation.

So far I’m really happy with how this is coming together. I feel like I’m hitting a good balance of photos, memorabilia, stories from my past, trivia and stuff from my current life. I’d like to add a few of the bigger stories of my life still, but if I can keep this up, I’ll have a pretty good summary of who I am I think.

• My 40th Year Project
• Update: 40th Year Project
• 40th Year Project: Part 3
• 40th Year Project: Part 4

I wasn’t a particularly sporty kid, but like everyone else I loved recess. I liked swinging across the monkey bars, hanging out on the top of the jungle gym (the old-skool kind that was made out of those slippery metal pipes) and chasing and being chased by the boys in my class. But most of all, I loved playing hopscotch.

I think a big part of the reason I loved hopscotch was because I really wasn’t very physically adept. I could never swing as far on the bars, or spin around them like my gymnast best friend. And I wasn’t nearly fast enough to actually catch one of the boys when we played chase. But my balance was pretty good and I could hop on one foot so I was a decent hopscotch player.

At home I would carefully draw hopscotch courts on our driveway with a piece of chalk. I had to be careful to make the boxes big enough to comfortably land in, but not so big that it was hard to hop over them when the pebble was resting inside. It was a tricky balancing act. At school I used the courts that were painted on the blacktop. There were several different styles — some that were just squares and rectangles, some that had boxes dissected on the diagonal and the ones with curves which were the fanciest by far.

At recess time, my friends and I would run out to the blacktop as soon as the bell rang and hunt up a pebble each to use as our markers. If you could find a bottle cap or something else distinctive that was even better because it helped avoid confusion as to whose marker was whose. Then we would take turns tossing our rocks into the different boxes, 1 through 10, hopping over and around them, then turning around and stopping to pick up the rock on the way back. Aim, balance, hopping skill — I had it all, baby. And I rocked recess on the hopscotch court!

Did you know that in the past twenty years children have lost an average of 8 hours of recess per week? I had three recesses per day and my son only has two. I’ve read about some schools where children don’t get recess at all!

Danimals Rally for Recess is a national initiative designed to create healthy competition, pitting school against school. Go to Danimals Rally for Recess for a chance to win $20,000 for your Elementary school playground. Plus each day Danimals is giving recess-related prizes to keep kids healthy and active. Share your Recess memories below and go to Rally for Recess for more information on how your school can win!

I have partnered with Dannon/Danimals to help promote the “Rally for Recess” campaign. I have been compensated for my time commitment to the program, which includes writing about the promotion and product, and hosting a giveaway where the prize has been provided by Dannon/Danimals. However, my opinions are entirely my own and I have not been paid to publish positive comments. Contest Rules.

Today is my 39th birthday! Yay! Happy birthday to me!

I am a lover of birthdays and I have no absolutely no reluctance telling people that it’s my birthday. I invite people out to lunch with me, I drop it into conversation with abandon and I relish in the long list of birthday greetings I get on Facebook. (I don’t like it when people sing the Happy Birthday song to me in restaurants though, so please don’t ever do that to me!)

39 feels like a big birthday to me — not so much because of what has passed but because of what is coming. I’m about to embark on my fortieth year! Yowza. This seems like too big of a milestone to just let it go by with no reflection, so I’ve cooked up a project to work on this year. I call it:

Wendy’s 40th Year Scrapbook

I’ve been wanting to do a scrapbook about myself for quite a while now for a bunch of reasons. First off, if I’m going to scrapbook about anyone, I think it’s just as much my responsibility to scrapbook about myself as it is to scrapbook about my kids and the rest of my family. I really liked my self-portrait a day project that I did earlier this year and I’d like to extend that a bit. Also, when we moved I unearthed a lot of sentimental objects and papers that have been in storage for years — decades even! I want that stuff out in a book where I can enjoy it instead of packed up in boxes in the garage. My thinking is that if I do just a little bit every day — print a photo, jot down a story, pull something out of storage — it won’t be a terribly daunting task. And at the end of this year, I’ll have an awesome record of my life!

To start, I bought this fantastically gorgeous buttercup yellow photo album. It’s a basic 3-ring binder so I can put a bunch of different sizes of pages in it.

I’ve decided I’m going to primarily use these Becky Higgens Project Life page protectors. They have lots of different pockets in them — many of them 4 x 6 inches — so I can easily slip photos right into them. The other slots are 3 x 4 inches and I have a bunch of cards that size leftover from my Project 365 albums that I can use for those. She has more of these page protectors in different configurations coming out later this year, so I might get some of those too.

I put together a couple pages this morning to kick the project off. Some of the stuff I put in included a photo and part of the writing from my Strawberry Shortcake blog post, a print out of the poster hanging over my desk, a photo of myself looking awesome in guitar sunglasses, and a screenshot and some journaling about my addiction to Google Analytics. I filled in one of the gaps with some cute paper and a monogram.

The second side of the page had some Incredibooth photos I printed out all on one photo sheet, a picture of me in our family’s ridiculous birthday hat from this morning, a flower fairy card I found in a box, a sticker from Burning Man 2000 and a doily that was leftover from making valentines from either high school or college. I still have a couple slots left on this page that I’ll fill in later.

Other things I’m hoping to include:

• stories and photos from my childhood
• bigger pages with papers and stuff I’ve saved in boxes
• bits and pieces of my daily life (kind of like I did for Project 365)
• I’d like to dig into the story-telling prompts from two books I’ve had for a while but haven’t really used much — The Book of Me by Angie Pederson and The Journaler’s Handbook by Tracy White.

I’ll try to post some pages now and then as I get deeper into this project. Stay tuned!

Anyone want to join me?

Interested in seeing more of this project? Check out these other posts:

• My 40th Year Project
• Update: 40th Year Project
• 40th Year Project: Part 3
• 40th Year Project: Part 4

When my parents were visiting earlier this month my dad asked us to pose for a few family photos. He’s an avid 3-D photographer and he likes to get pictures of us whenever he can. Since we were already posing, I asked if he’d take a few with our camera too. This is my absolute favorite of the bunch:

Honestly, could it be more terrible? Zach’s eyes are closed, Wyatt is making a wacky face, Augie’s covering his face completely and I look serious and mean!

This one is a bit better:

Wyatt’s still making a goofy face, but at least we’re all smiling and looking at the camera!

After yesterday’s Strawberry Shortcake doll extravaganza, I’m sure you are dying to see my Strawberry Shortcake play sets now!

Let’s start with Flutterby the Butterfly! This is one of the most fantastic of the transportation methods in Strawberry Land! Two dolls can sit in seats that are jammed into poor Flutterby’s back. If you roll it along the floor the wings go up and down. You can also make the wings go by pulling a red trigger near the back. Unfortunately when I pulled the seats out after taking this picture, I broke the posts  on both of them. Bummer.

I also had the Carousel. Four dolls can sit in the little seats and then you can push the plunger on the top down to make it spin in much the same way you would a top. Something has happened to this over the years to make it a little fussy, but it still works if you push the plunger just right.

This next set is one of my very favorites! I liked it a lot as a kid, but now as an adult I think it’s very clever. The set is called The Snail Cart with Escargot. Escargot would be the snail, in case you hadn’t quite gotten there. The snail is harnessed to a little cart which has a yellow wagon on it. Four dolls can sit around the edges of the wagon and they’re strapped on with little rubber straps that are a pain in the butt to fasten. A big strawberry fits in the cart. When you run the snail across the floor, his head moves from side to side.

OK, here’s the clever part! If you take the cart off the harness and turn it upside-down it becomes a picnic table complete with berry cute sticker place mats. Then, if you take the lid off the giant strawberry, you can stick it on a post (not pictured in the first photo) and turn it into an umbrella. The strawberry is filled up with strawberry ice cream, two plates and two individual scoops of ice cream. It also has two spoons, but I lost one.

OK, now it’s time to pull out the big guns: The Berry Bake Shoppe!

If you open the Berry Bake Shoppe, it reveals a garden, bakery, and sales counter. Let’s take a tour, shall we?

To start, Strawberry Shortcake waters the garden. When it was new, you could push down on the big leaf which would compress some foam. Then the foam would slowly expand again and it would look like the strawberries were growing. After 30 years the foam has rotted though, so the strawberries are always down now. This is the only part of my set that’s broken or missing as far as I can tell.

After the strawberries have grown, Strawberry Shortcake picks a giant berry and puts it in her basket.

Next she cooks the berry up in a big pot on the stove.

She also bakes off a pie shell and a shortcake in the dual ovens.

And finally she concocts a giant strawberry, whipped cream, shortcake-pie extravaganza! I think it looks berry delicious!

When you’re not using the various pieces, they can be stored on the shelves of the sales counter.

Here is another gem I found  at the bottom of the Berry Bake Shoppe box. This is a price list for the various items offered for sale in the shop. This isn’t my handwriting, so I’m guessing it was written out by my bestie, Nancy. She perfected that fantastic, bubbly handwriting that I tried so hard — but failed — to achieve.

I love this list! Strawberries were used as currency in Strawberry Land, of course, so we carefully wrote out both the dollar and strawberry prices. This was necessary so we could keep the complex 1:1 conversion rate straight in our heads. I also like the completely random prices we assigned to the various fruits offered for sale. For example the raspberries, huckleberries and blueberries cost a mere half strawberry while the lemons were fairly expensive at 5 strawberries. And the “P. Pies” boasted a stunningly high price of 50 strawberries! What the heck was baked into those pies?

If you want to see the full set of photos (including all the boxes which are kind of fun but kind of repetitive) you can visit my Strawberry Shortcake set on Flickr.

Thanks for indulging me!

When we were cleaning out our basement for our move a few months ago, I came across a box that held some of the most beloved of all my possessions: my Strawberry Shortcake dolls.

I knew I had these, of course, but I hadn’t opened the box in about seven or eight years, so I’d forgotten exactly what was in it. The box held all of my dolls — most of them still in their original boxes — and several play sets that went with them. I nearly started crying with happiness right there on the spot.

Everyone has a toy that is the most special to them — the object that comes to mind when someone says the word “toy” — and my Strawberry Shortcake dolls are mine. I have fond memories of a lot of my playthings — Barbies, Lego, my Cabbage Patch Kid, Fisher Price toys — but these were the creme de la creme of all of my toys. I played with these constantly. I pined for new dolls. I poured over the little catalogs that came in the boxes. I wanted Strawberry Shortcake clothes and sheets and books and movies. I inserted the word “berry” in conversation more times than I care to admit. In many ways, these toys are a physical manifestation of my childhood. Heady stuff, right?

Would you like to meet my little friends? Of course you would!

First up is the girl herself, Strawberry Shortcake! Frankly, though I loved old Strawbs, I secretly didn’t really think she was all that cute. Her outfit is OK, I guess, but that hat is just awful. What the heck is up with that thing? What hat style is that based on? I do like her pinafore though and those striped tights are fantastic.

Next we have Apple Dumplin’ and her pet Tea Time Turtle. Apple Dumplin’ was a baby and I’m vaguely remembering that she was Strawberry Shortcake’s little sister. Does that sound right to anyone else, or am I just making that up?

Apple Dumplin’ is particularly memorable to me because my brother always called her “Apple Take-a-dumplin’”. At the time, I didn’t think that was funny at all, but now I realize how hilarious and clever the name was. Gross too. (He also called Strawberry Shortcake “Strawberry Fartcake”. Nice.)

Next up — Blueberry Muffin! Of all of the dolls I dug out, this one has fared the worst. Her hat has this weird sticky residue all over it and the rubber bands that held her pigtails have rotted.

Here is the token boy — Huckleberry Pie. I always thought he had a really cute face, but his outfit is lame. I remember playing that he was going fishing a lot.

Ahhhh…Lemon Meringue. She was my favorite of all the dolls. I loved her so! I always thought she was the very cutest — her face, her curly blond hair, that adorable polka dot dress and those shoes with the bows! She had a weird hat too, though. Surprisingly, I never cut off the little things that connected it to her head so it’s still there and her hair is in awesome shape because of it. Check it out:

Raspberry Tart was another favorite, probably because she was pink. (I was a pink-loving girl.) This character was my best friend, Nancy’s, favorite. I like her bloomers and the eyelet on her shirt. She also has fantastically cute shoes.

This is Apricot, another baby, and her rabbit Hopsalot. I lost Apricot’s hat, which is a bummer. Incidentally, Apricot is the only one of the dolls that still has any fragrance left on her. That was one of the big features of the Strawberry Shortcake dolls — they all smelled like their namesakes.

This is Orange Blossom. She is special because my Grandma bought her for me on a trip to Belgium. The box she came in is written in French!

My grandma bought me most of the toys in my Strawberry Shortcake collection. When I was a kid, she was an assistant manager at K-Mart and one of the departments she supervised was toys. How awesome is that? She often got deals on toys when they went on Blue Light Special and my brother, cousins and I were spoiled rotten.

(Someday I’ll tell you how I got one of the four Cabbage Patch Kid dolls that came into her store at the height of the Cabbage Patch frenzy. Actually, now that I think about it, you can probably figure it out on your own.)

Why did my grandma buy Orange Blossom in Belgium? Because K-Mart didn’t sell black dolls.

In 1981.

Even at the age of nine, I was outraged by this fact. My grandma looked all over town for Orange Blossom and couldn’t find her anywhere. So she bought her in another country. Crazy.

This little cutie is Lime Chiffon. I actually don’t remember her very well, so I’m guessing she came along close to the end of my Strawberry Shortcake obsession. I also have the little parrot that came with her but I didn’t find it in the box until after I took her picture.

Here we have Almond Cookie and MarziPanda. The doll is in great shape, but the bear is pretty gross — dirty and sticky. I think these little sidekick animals didn’t do so well because the fragrances reacted with the plastic.

This disco diva is Angel Cake. Her skunk Souffle used to be purple. I love Angel Cake’s awesome gold headband and her Farrah hair.

And finally we have The Purple Pieman and Berry Bird. The Purple Pieman was the bad guy of Strawberry Land and I distinctly remember that he cackled a lot when I played with him. He also tried to steal whatever the other dolls were eating.

I also found a few extra outfits in one of the boxes that I’d completely forgotten about — a party dress and a one piece jogging suit. I love how very 80′s that is! This is also the only comb I found in any of the boxes. Kind of crazy since all the dolls came with one. I remember those combs being everywhere in my room when I was growing up.

I also saved a lot of the papers that came in the boxes with the various toys. Here you can see a catalog and one of the cards you could fill up with proofs of purchase to get Strawberry Shortcake jewelry. I saved enough for the ring and the necklace, but they are nowhere to be found.

Here is one of the thank you cards that came with every doll. I used to just sit and stare at this, in awe of how cute it was!

Tomorrow: the play sets, including The Berry Bake Shoppe!

Did you play with Strawberry Shortcake dolls? Tell me about it!