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Anything Worth Doing...
Jan. 11th, 2006 03:10 pm...is worth overdoing.
2 of my 3 daughters now live out-of-state but I still have Rubbermaid tubs full of their childhood, recently moved from a storage locker to my 2-rooms-less-than-I-used-to-have apartment. So I have been dropping hints, not terribly subtle, about my eldest either taking some of her stuff or allowing me to get rid of it. Trying to get this process started, I set my sights on the supersize tub of "My Little Ponies" which had all the ponies of all 3 girls combined. And, yes, during the 48 hour overlap that they were all here at Christmas, they did sort through the bin and each grabbed their 'specialist' ponies and gave me permission to dispose of the rest.
I cleverly decided to sell them on ebay, and went online to check out what I might expect to get for 48 well-played-with ponies and an amazing amount of little accessories. First I lined them all up on the carpet, and that's where it started.
There is a real baby toy that consists of different sized colored plastic 'donuts' that get stacked on a plastic post. We had 3 of these posts for baby My Little Ponies, and when I gave Adrienne the handful of donuts and told her to put them together, we discovered that we had all the stupid little pieces for 3 complete sets! Then a prelimary look online shows one of the bedraggled ponies on my carpet is selling for $15 in a bidding war. I pointed this out to Adrienne, and she offered to see if she could clean him up. 30 minutes later she shows me a squeaky clean pony with a damp but thoroughly detangled (with my good creme rinse) tail and mane. Hmmmm, I think. We've got nothing to do for the next half hour...
50 minutes later the bathtub is draining and 48 freshly scrubbed ponies are lined up all around the lip of the bathtub. Getting home 6 hours later I immediately walk into the bathroom, grab the first pony in line and start working out the snarly tail. In 2 hours I manage to groom 21 of them, then proceed to spend 3 hours online researching exactly which ponies I have. (There are people out there who have websites with year-by-year breakdowns of which pony was issued which year, how to tell if you have a genuine or imitation pony, the difference between the initial 1982 run and the duplicates manufactured in 1983, which baby pony came with the stacking toy and which came with a pull-toy duckie...I point out there are multiple people, not just one person, with sites like this...)
The upshot of all this is that today I have half a collection of gorgeous, ready-for-ebay ponies and half a collection to finish fixing up, and a bag of accessories to put with the proper ones (I might as well do it right all the way), and 3 daughters with 3 bags of pathetic-looking ponies which, in good conscience, I will also have to make beautiful, because to expend all this effort on the ones I'm getting rid of and not on the ones my daughters decided to keep as cherished memories would just be awful of me.
Only I made Sarah take her bag back to Tennesee after Christmas, and she said, even though she is going to be in Chicago this weekend, she is NOT going to bring those %#&*($*@ ponies that I made such a big deal about her taking back here just for me to clean them. So I guess either Adrienne or I will have to go there and fix them up...
Yep, anything worth doing...
2 of my 3 daughters now live out-of-state but I still have Rubbermaid tubs full of their childhood, recently moved from a storage locker to my 2-rooms-less-than-I-used-to-have apartment. So I have been dropping hints, not terribly subtle, about my eldest either taking some of her stuff or allowing me to get rid of it. Trying to get this process started, I set my sights on the supersize tub of "My Little Ponies" which had all the ponies of all 3 girls combined. And, yes, during the 48 hour overlap that they were all here at Christmas, they did sort through the bin and each grabbed their 'specialist' ponies and gave me permission to dispose of the rest.
I cleverly decided to sell them on ebay, and went online to check out what I might expect to get for 48 well-played-with ponies and an amazing amount of little accessories. First I lined them all up on the carpet, and that's where it started.
There is a real baby toy that consists of different sized colored plastic 'donuts' that get stacked on a plastic post. We had 3 of these posts for baby My Little Ponies, and when I gave Adrienne the handful of donuts and told her to put them together, we discovered that we had all the stupid little pieces for 3 complete sets! Then a prelimary look online shows one of the bedraggled ponies on my carpet is selling for $15 in a bidding war. I pointed this out to Adrienne, and she offered to see if she could clean him up. 30 minutes later she shows me a squeaky clean pony with a damp but thoroughly detangled (with my good creme rinse) tail and mane. Hmmmm, I think. We've got nothing to do for the next half hour...
50 minutes later the bathtub is draining and 48 freshly scrubbed ponies are lined up all around the lip of the bathtub. Getting home 6 hours later I immediately walk into the bathroom, grab the first pony in line and start working out the snarly tail. In 2 hours I manage to groom 21 of them, then proceed to spend 3 hours online researching exactly which ponies I have. (There are people out there who have websites with year-by-year breakdowns of which pony was issued which year, how to tell if you have a genuine or imitation pony, the difference between the initial 1982 run and the duplicates manufactured in 1983, which baby pony came with the stacking toy and which came with a pull-toy duckie...I point out there are multiple people, not just one person, with sites like this...)
The upshot of all this is that today I have half a collection of gorgeous, ready-for-ebay ponies and half a collection to finish fixing up, and a bag of accessories to put with the proper ones (I might as well do it right all the way), and 3 daughters with 3 bags of pathetic-looking ponies which, in good conscience, I will also have to make beautiful, because to expend all this effort on the ones I'm getting rid of and not on the ones my daughters decided to keep as cherished memories would just be awful of me.
Only I made Sarah take her bag back to Tennesee after Christmas, and she said, even though she is going to be in Chicago this weekend, she is NOT going to bring those %#&*($*@ ponies that I made such a big deal about her taking back here just for me to clean them. So I guess either Adrienne or I will have to go there and fix them up...
Yep, anything worth doing...
