January Roundup

It's still a bit of a dolly drought over here, as it almost always is. January is a dry dolly month in the UK with the big restock not till the end of the month.

But even with a restock looming, it's pretty boring. We have, over the past few years been getting less and less in the toy section, the Argos catalogue which used to be SO exciting has steadily dwindled from 6-8 pages of exciting new dolls to 1 page of same ol' same ol' barbie dolls and junk.
I'm not convinced 2019 is going to change the trend and suddenly give us things worth caring about all of a sudden.

I mean new stuff is hitting but it's almost all blind box stuff or massively overpriced or just not to my taste at all.

I wandered through the Entertainer a few days ago and half the damn store is LOL!

Bratz Collector 2018 - Cameron

So for those who aren't aware, MGA rereleased Bratz again.

this time as "adult collector" dolls with a long time fan and fashion designer on board.

These came out before christmas but the eye watering price coupled with a really quite catastrophic quality control problem made me really reluctant to order any of them.

I've been watching them for all this time on Amazon (where they're an exclusive) HOPING they'd come down for their absolutely gouging £50 price tag and that the quality issues would be resolved but alas, thus far no such luck for the girls.

However, Cameron DID briefly come down in price a few days ago.

I already had some vouchers from Swagbucks and my dad but even with vouchers £50 was painful. Cam dropped to £45ish, which was still painful but with my Swagbucks voucher he was about £40 which was the absolute max I was willing to pay and nghh, you know Bratz Boyz are my weakness!

they're the first doll line I collected so they have a real place in my heart.

Buuut let's rewind a bit

Post christmas roundup

Well the festive season is finally over, we made it!

Sure it wasn't without tears and anguish and the usual depressive state, but we made it!
I just gotta make it to new year.

So let's look at toys!

Fresh Dolls by World Of EPI

I'm gonna admit this, I LOVE ethnicly diverse dolls. I'm not totally sure why though, perhaps it's because growing up with a sea of identical blonde, blue eyed, white barbie dolls just bored me to tears? Or maybe it's because I like my dolls to represent the world around me? Or maybe it's because I just think they're pretty. Whatever the case, non white dolls are difficult for me to ignore and not buy.
I can't help it! They're so often far far more interesting than the much "safer" white dolls like generic Barbies of old.

So when I saw some doll people talking about Fresh Dolls I knew I had to go check them out.

A bit like So In Style by Mattel, or the failed Prettie Girls dolls (terrible awful name for a doll line that), the Fresh dolls are Barbie-like dolls who are supposed to be more representative of black women and something a little new and different to the market.

Now, on the one hand you could argue with Mattel's current Fashionistas being extremely diverse in their skin tones and sculpts there's not that much NEED for yet another barbie scale doll on the market but in my opinnion, the more the merrier and it's always cool to see how another company does things differently.

Also, I agree with SO MUCH of this company's philosophy.
https://www.thefreshdolls.com/ You can read Dr Lisa's explanation of how important representation and confidence is for kids, especially little girls of colour. I've seen the study she mentions and it really is absolutely heartbreaking. I'm pretty sure i've had rants similar about the importance of representation here on my blog. 

I also had a chat on facebook to Dr Lisa and she's so lovely. I knew I had to get one of these dolls to review.

Unfortunately in the UK that was a tall order, as for some stupid reason we don't get many black dolls over here (because black brits are totally mythical right? *eyeroll*) and as I predicted, alas, the Fresh Dolls were not ordered into UK stores. US shipping was a bit prohibitive, what with US postage being really high and the pound being especially crap at the moment, so it wasn't really economically viable for me to order and import. I waited, hoping either they'd figure out a cheaper shipping method, amazon us would get some in or by some fluke a UK stockist would actually order them in.

Well.. it happened. A uk stockist!
X-S Stock in fact, who appear to be some sort of outlet store a bit like B&M and Home Bargains.
Now i'm not sure if these were ordered in by somewhere like Toys R Us and X S ended up getting the stock for cheap or what, but heck yeah deluxe dolls for £5:99! (+ shipping of course)

I grabbed Indigo and Jacqueline. I wanted Indigo the most because she has amazing hair.
Sadly they only had the three deluxe girls, i'd have liked the budget Mia with her beautiful afro as well but oh well.

Anyway, let's get a look at this line of dolls!

Roundup - Bratz Bundle, Pelham Puppets, bjds and more

The big problem when you're supposed to be saving is that when you look at your bank balance you see all this lovely delicious money and temptation sets in.

It's very bad.

and my impulse control is especially bad because we're coming into "tear my hair out, scream, cry, angst and stress" season.
I make no secret of the fact I really HATE Christmas, but on top of that festive pile of stressful shit there's also 3 birthdays to plan and buy for all within a few weeks of the big day.
So that means that about now I
1: finish my christmas shopping
and
2: Stress starts to set in as I have to arrange 2 birthday parties close to christmas that most people are too fucking rude to RSVP to and like 1 person comes to in the end, organise transport for christmas itself and arrange to do something nice with husband for HIS birthday too.

This year I haven't been that organised. I dunno why, the year has just evaporated.

I'm starting to lose my damn mind.

so when I start spiralling like this you know what happens? Oh heck yeah, I BUY STUFF. To give me a momentary "feel better" feeling.

It's a terrible habit.

Um....

Just a random aside,

looking at my "referring sites" for my blog and discovered that the second highest referral, after Google, is a porn site.

Uh...

I... don't know how to feel about this.

They better not be fapping off to photos of me in my sexy sindy hat <_< >_> lol.

i'm bad at resolutions - 10kg of dolls? Heck yeah 10kg of dolls!

There's a good reason i've never made new years resolutions, i'm terrible at keeping any sort of promise to myself.

The past month or so i've been getting increasingly stressed by the selling of stuff, the constant trips to the post office, making sure everything was right and proper before sending it out, the chaos of packaging up 12 things in one night, it was getting to me.
So I said to husband "okay, i think i'm gonna take a break from selling things for a bit once these auctions end"

so what'd I do?

I bought a 10kg box of monster high dolls.

*headdesk*