I've always had a plushie with me....

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Idk if I've posted about this already, but over Christmas break I was looking through a photo album that my grandmother had (one of many) and found a lot of family photos from the early 90s...when my cousins and I were tiny kids. It was sort of a bittersweet experience bcuz some of the photos showed one of cousins who passed away when she was 7 from complications following a boat accident. Other than that, though, looking thru the photos was very pleasant and nostalgic, and I was surprised to realize something as I paged through....

I literally had a plushie with me in nearly every photo with me in it. Well, there were a couple that showed me playing with a small toy of Pongo from 101 Dalmatians, but mostly all the photos of me showed me with at least one or two plushies.

Apparently during the time that particular batch of photos was taken (I was probably close to two years old) I carried around plushies of Eeyore, Barney, Simba (although I think he belonged to somebody else), Pooh, the little bunny in pajamas from Goodnight Moon, etc.

The photos that interest me the most are the ones that show me literally withdrawing from all that's going on around me and engaging in a private "conversation" with whichever stuffed animal I have in my possession. I was amazed to see that I did that as early as the age of one and a half or two. Perhaps even when I was that young, I was able to intuit that my stuffed animals were my "constants," my ideal friends, in an environment that I could not always predict or control and was given to change.

As I got older, my stuffed animals and toys were some of the only friends I had - I was scared to venture out of my house and onto my own front yard as a kid bcuz these two boys who were about my age would sometimes come out of their house, see me across the street, and come running over, bombarding me with the unwanted sensory input of their screams, hollers, their slaps and shoves that I was never prepared for. Even worse, if my mom saw them come over, I was stuck "playing" with them....apparently, she was all right with her daughter being tortured (what it felt like to me, anyway) if it meant I was getting some socialization. The only time I ever went outside while the two of them were on the loose was if my dad came outside with me. He never allowed anyone to harm me in any way. Sometimes remembering that I had the option of retreating into soft, fuzzy embraces of my stuffed friends afterwards was enough to get me through "playdates" with my domineering peers. Heck, even as an adult, I use that to get through the day.

...Anyway, yeah. Just wanted to share this. Maybe someone can relate to it...the whole "having relationships with objects at a very young age" thing. I didn't think it began that early for me, which is why I'm so amazed.

I loved my plushies growing up. There's a photo of me around the age of about 4 - 5 where I am holding a plushie of Mufasa from The Lion King. I don't remember much about my time with him, but my mom says that I loved him very much. I can also remember during my toddler years I had a plushie of the baby from the puppet sitcom Dinosaurs. Throughout elementary school, I had so many plushies that they filled three or four wicker baskets. I got rid of them as I entered my teen years because I thought that I was getting too old for them and that getting rid of plushies and other childhood toys was some kind of rite of passage. As an adult I can see just how wrong that mentality was, and I miss all of my old toys. But I am making up for lost ground, because I have a whole new collection of toys that cover my room! Arguably my room looks more like a kid's at the age of 22 than it ever did while I was physically a kid...

me to and

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still carry them around