A doll, a doll, William wants a doll…

Thanks everyone for comments & email about biting, and about playgroups. If you have more thoughts keep ‘em coming, if you like. I called the mum whose son was bit but only got her voice mail; I’m going to just proceed as usual until I hear differently with playgroup; and we’re working to teach Noah to do something else instead, although – he is still only 13 months.

Something else that happened at playgroup on Friday before the big bite was that Noah found a doll and he was really into exploring it – the eyes, the hands, the ears, etc.  It suddenly occured to me that he doesn’t own a doll. I’d kind of assumed he wouldn’t find one that interesting yet, is part of the reason. The other is that a lot of his toys have come from gifts and – surprise, surprise – no one seems to have given my son a doll, probably because the whole boy, doll thing is apparently still touchy in our society.

How touchy? I was about to find out. Because, woe is me, I decided to go buy Noah a doll. My mistake was to value efficiency over thoughtfulness, and I hit a local small mall for a couple of errands and go to the evil but sometimes necessary Toys R Us. Although I know this will happen again because it is dreadfully convenient and there is a serious dearth of independent toy stores anywhere close to me, keep thinking ‘evil’ as I go on.

First I checked the (co-ed) baby area for dolls that are, you know, safe for babies. There were none resembling actual human beings in the slightest, and I skipped the Dora aisles too.  I knew what I was going to find but I still went through backwards and started with the “blue” area of the store – you know, the one with the action figures, building toys, and swords. Nope, not a doll without guns or capes to be found. So then I hit the “pink” area of the store.

This is in a very mixed area of Scarborough, by the way, and this is what I found. Rows and rows of pink boxes, many of them referring to “Little Mommy” (this is actually a label in fact), and all of them – Cabbage Patch, blah blah blah – containing white girl-dolls in dresses, or pink onesies.  Around the corner as it turned out there were a few select boxes of more normal looking unisex dolls in navy blue – 4 boxes, in fact – but they all cost over $50 ’cause they came in car seats with strollers or something like that, and weren’t rated for kids under 3 ’cause of choking hazards.

So back to the sea of pink and mommy labels I went and finally unearthed a box of “twin newborns” that had a girl twin and a boy twin and were rated for 18 months, which after close examination of the parts I decided was ok for 13. Which is good. Because that was the only boy doll in the place. (I thought Cabbage Patch dolls came in both, but the ones they had were all bow-bedecked.) Apparently boy baby dolls only come with twin sisters. 

And yes, Noah could certainly have a girl baby doll but I was kind of on a mission at this point and feeling a little oppositional defiant and had settled on a boy – plus - why is Dora the only doll of colour??? In Scarborough??? And I don’t think they were sold out of all the dolls of colour either. I did a little stroll through the Barbie aisle and although they did, yes, have Bratz oversexed dolls in various skin tones they seemed not to have ordered in any Barbies of colour, unless you count brunettes that way.

!!

Back to the doll aisle. Of course the /box/ for the twin newborns was in fact the Little Mommy box and I only noticed once I got home that the newborns themselves, who are permanently dressed, have “little mommy” stamped on their clothes!!

Grr! What about the little daddies!!! Err not that Noah can read.

But the whole experience Irked me. What the fuck? Boys roleplay too, you know, and they like to be the daddies and it is 2006 why oh why oh why is “good marketing” to have the “girl toys” segregated from the “boy toys” and there to be no male dolls in the world (or at least dolls without dresses and bows; I did not look under the dresses so perhaps I am not progressive enough?) never mind /marketing/ the dolls /to boys/.  Why do dolls come with toy strollers and toy bottles but not toy trucks or something? I’m sure they do in better toy stores and on the Internet and I should never, ever have gone to Toys R Us. But regardless -

Please don’t tell me “Free to Be You and Me” is still radical.

That’s what I was fuming as I pressed past all the movie tie-ins in a feminist snit to purchase my Little Mommy Twin Newborns and get the fuck out of there and return to the sanity of Internet shopping where I may have to wait two weeks and pay duty, but I’m sure if I look hard enough I can find little boy dolls certified to have come only from lesbian-of-colour egg donors implanted into surrogate mothers in order to have them adopted by bi-racial married gay men, which also have removable parts in case of gender reassignment surgery, so there you freaking Toys R Us (or at the very least I could have perhaps decided to try Uglydolls or something).

Anyways, here is my fine moment of parental gratitude coming up to offset the snitty consumer fit: so we get the dolls home and unwrap them and bemoan the little mommy printed bits and then show Noah and he, confronted with an object representing a small baby…

leaned over and patted its head and snuggled it. Just like both his parents do.

Awwwwww.

I also held the doll up to my chest and Noah signed “nurse” quite happily and today has brought a doll to me once to “nurse” the doll.  Which kind of floored me; I knew he was making truck sounds for his trucks but I wasn’t really aware that err, imagination was actually, you know, starting. 

Let’s hope for a world where his imagination doesn’t get too truncated by the need to conform to all this bullshit sexist freaking nonsense from the local Toys R Us. Next time, we head downtown to the insanely expensive stores.