Calico Crap

When we lived in Kentucky one of our neighbors' kids had a ton of little fuzzy animals with clothes and furniture and all sorts of dollhousey stuff, and I marveled at the sheer volume of cuteness she managed to shovel into her room.

Then last year we ended up buying Liza the stupid Calico Critters mouse family in hopes that she might actually want to play with a dollhouse if it contained animals instead of people. Oops.

Liza has shown minimal interest in the mice - when we first got them she liked to carry them around, and she loved rending the clothes into hunks in an effort to remove them, but that's about the extent of their play value for a barely-three-year-old.

But ...

When I was at the resale shop yesterday and I looked behind the counter and they had not one, not two, but all three sets of Calico Critters wedding stuff, I was unable to resist. Because, you see, Liza is going to be a flower girl in July, and I figure all the play-acting I can jam in between now and then increases the likelihood that she'll actually make it down the aisle without being velcroed to me. And the stuff was ridiculously cheap - I think I paid $12 for all three sets, which is less than half the retail price of just the wedding car. Score!

Liza was all about carrying around the bride and groom, which have predictably been named Susan and Jeff. She insisted on hearing wedding stories in the car, and she wanted to unpack every last little piece as soon as we got home from dropping my MIL off at the airport.

That took a while, because somewhere in Japan there is an extremely detail-oriented designer who gets off on making ridiculously meticulous sets of stuff to go with these dolls. The bride and groom are like 3" tall, and yet the wedding luncheon set comes complete with a dozen appetizers, each of which is approximately 1/8" square. Lord, how I wish I was kidding about that.

The best is the ice bucket, which includes a removable clear plastic "ice" cube that is molded to fit around the removable bottle of sparkling cider. Yah - like the 3-yr-old is really going to have a use for that. I, however, have been getting those mice drunker than Homer Simpson at happy hour, and boy, is that fun!

For now the luncheon set is packed away because I can't handle the thought of all those tiny pieces getting lost in the first day and a half of play, and Liza was just getting uber-frustrated with the fact that everything fell over whenever she touched anything. One of us was going to lose it if we had to stand those sparkling cider flutes up again ... trust me, we'll both be happier if those disappear for a few months. Or I may investigate the option of "securing" the tinier pieces, which is what some of the eBay sellers seem to have done. Where's that Gorilla Glue?

In the meantime, though, we'll be running "Susan" and "Jeff" up and down the aisles, right behind the little mouse flower girls dropping minute plastic flower petals on the tiny little carpet (not kidding) while the mouse preacher signs the wedding certificate with the quill pen the anal Japanese guy so thoughtfully included.

Sometime between now and July I just have to explain to Liza why Jeff won't be wearing a baby blue satin tux at the real wedding, unlike his kitty counterpart ... or maybe I'll just rent him one. That might be easier.