Gwen's Baby Dolls

Earlier this year, I started looking for baby dolls for Gwen. I wasn't sure if she'd like dolls so I knew the few I picked out might be the only dolls she'd ever have.

I found three Corolle dolls that I really liked. They're made very well, have soft bodies, smell of vanilla, and (best of all) they're machine washable. I thought the Asian ones were absolutely precious too and I was happy that her first dolls would have brown hair and eyes like her!

All three dolls lived on a shelf in Gwen's room during the wait for referral. After referral, I took the smallest off of the shelf and mailed it to her SWI in China. The other two waited here at home. Today was their first face to face meeting! It was a supervised 'visitation' since, at 17 months, Gwen is too young to have nice dolls to play with.

She's been admiring them up on the shelf ever since she came home in mid September. A few times, I carried her to them and let her touch their tiny toes but she seemed nervous -- as if they might be real babies. Lately, she's been more interested and she often points at them and makes her favorite baby noise which means "May I please see that, Mommy?" but sounds something like Uhhhhhhnn!

In anticipation of this special meeting,I grabbed the camera, pointed it at her, then took the dolls and handed them over. The picture above is her first reaction. Then she looked down at the larger doll and said "Hi!" about 100 times! Here she is (below) doing that. It was very cute!

She seemed to really liked them and lovingly carried both of them around for about ten minutes. Then she plopped them on the floor and ran out into the hall and banged on her big brother's door so he'd open it and she could listen to him practice his electric guitar. She really loves music - any type of music! Raffi, Andrea Bocelli, or AFI. She loves it all!

The jury is still out on whether she really liked the dolls. They're back up on the shelf for now. We'll try this again in a few months.