Bubbles & Dolls

Dumbasses
this pic has nothing to do with this post but I don’t have any recent pics of Sym to illustrate it (nor would she want me to) so these silly idiots will have to do

The other day Sym came home from school in a bad mood. She’s been working on this big project and a huge chunk of it was due the next day. A huge chunk she hadn’t even started yet. When I asked her if she should have been working on this aspect of the project all along she was very “I don’t know, no one told me anything about it.” Such a typical tween.

That morning I’d picked up a package at the post office that just happened to contain an acrylic shelf designed to hold 96 bottles of nail polish (that is an amazon link but I got mine on ebay because I found a great deal on shipping to Canada, which that seller tragically no longer offers). I know I don’t post manicures much anymore but TRUST ME when I say I need this shelf. Since Gwen is now ultra mobile and I really am going to have to go back to work sooner or later I’ve been in super clean up mode. No more stacks of boxes! No more unbuilt Ikea pieces! No more homeless Pyrex being moved from surface to surface around the kitchen and dining room because there’s no space for it in the cupboard!

It’s actually been going great; I’ve gotten a lot of things sorted out and squared away BUT one thing that is NOT sorted out or squared away is the stackable storage drawers full of nail polish, which are currently piled at the end of the hallway. So I bought the shelf, and once I patch all the holes in the bathroom wall where a different shelf used to be (I moved that shelf into the laundry closet, I’m like totally shelf-obsessed haha see what I did there) I’ll put it up and then I can use the stackable drawers for storing craft supplies in my office,. It’s like the circle of life around here, with shelves and storage bins.

ANYWAY the day that Sym grumpy I’d just gotten the new shelf, and it was packaged in tons and tons of bubble wrap. And not regular bubble wrap; GIANT bubble wrap. When I was a kid and my mom had her porcelain doll business she had rolls of the stuff for shipping her dolls, and we were NEVER allowed to pop it. THE INJUSTICE. So as Sym complained to me about school I waved the bubble plastic at her. At first she was like “Even that can’t cheer me up!” but eventually she was more like “UGH FINE JUST GIMME THE BUBBLES.” I did, and she popped them, and I think it worked.

SPEAKING OF DOLLS, for some reason the other night I started thinking about these dolls my mom had when I was a kid (not porcelain ones she made, vinyl ones she’d bought) called Sasha Dolls. Man did I love those things. My sisters and I would have to ask to play with them and be really good or it was see ya, Sasha.
dc-SashaBooklets.3L
I did some reading up on them (which is what I do with every single thing that pops into my head, last week Taylor and I had an argument about whether or not we’d watched Star Wars recently and I was like IF WE HAVEN’T WATCHED IT RECENTLY THEN WHY DID I DO ALL THAT STAR WARS RESEARCH??? and it turns out that yes we had watched it) and I found this on the wikipedia page:
“Morganthaler created face sculpts for her dolls with subtle expressions to not dictate artificially exaggerated smiles, her concern that children surviving the horrors of WWII would not relate to dolls so happy in times of terror.”
WOW that really gives you a lot to think about. I do remember really liking their faces. They are like the doll version of Living With Chronic Bitchface. I would love to get some Sasha dolls (for… my kid? not at all for me) but unsurprisingly they are VERY EXPENSIVE these days.

Oh and Sym also got all the work done she needed to do for that project.

9 Replies to “Bubbles & Dolls”

  1. What happened to your Mom’s dolls? I don’t remember these at all, but I spent most of my youth up north where we relied on the catalogue.

    1. Well apparently she still has them! idk if they were ever really popular over here, they were only manufactured in England and Germany.

    1. I didn’t know you still had them, I assumed they were long gone, possibly having been scooped by one of my many siblings.

  2. I have blonde Sasha, Brown-haired Sasha, brown-haired Gregor, blonde Baby Sasha, black baby, and Cora and Caleb (black Sashas). Sadly, no redhead. Quite a lot of original costume bits, tho a few things missing, and a HUGE box of clothes I made (ooh, primitive, but it was before I made porcelain dolls—about 35 years ago) and some of them are rather cool. All sorts of “historical costumes” for them. The blonde Baby Sasha was originally bought ($5—expensive doll in those days!) for 5-year-old Lorna, who wasn’t very interested. (42 years ago, holey moley.) The fifth time I found the doll upside down in a mud puddle, I bought it from Lorna for $4, which was more money than she’d ever had so she was thrilled. So—baby cost me $19. Original clothes gone, alas.
    I’d give them to you, but I think I want to hang on to them a bit longer…not sure why.
    Oh–Oh–I have “Soccer Gregor” which was a limited edition, but I talked some rather dopey gal in a store into selling me just the outfit, for the Gregor I already had, for $10. Still have the whole outfit, including yellow soccer ball. I hope Dopey didn’t get fired.

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