Madame AlexBakugan

In the basement I have a box with a Magic-Marker heart scribbled on it labeled “Madame Alexander Dolls.” In it are gifts Grandma Jean and Mom lovingly collected for me over a lifetime of birthdays and Christmases. I have dolls in the costumes of distant lands, from Holland to Hungary. I have dolls from my favorite stories, Anne of Green Gables and Gone with the Wind. I have the Alice in Wonderland doll Wade gave me for my twentieth birthday that pretty much sealed the deal on our marriage.

After we got married I missed my dolls, and for our first Valentine’s Wade winningly gave me a curio to display them. They held the place of honor in the front rooms of our several abodes for many years. Then came the inevitable day when I resolved it was time make my home look like a grownup lives here (“Poor Wendy!”), and I tucked them away in the storage room to wait for a daughter of my own. And there they wait.

The dolls’ future usefulness hovers like the question mark punctuating the bassinet, the mobile, and the baby swing, also tucked away in the basement. But the dolls have weaker odds. If we go for another kiddo, we have just as good a chance of coming up with William Wade as we do Elizabeth Anne.

So in the meantime I’m getting more acquainted with the things boys collect, like boogers, matchbox cars, and Bakugan. My first experience with Bakugan came when the neighbor girl brought some over for the boys. I still think this was nice of her, although I suspect she stole them from our other neighbors. For anyone not currently raising boys, “Bakugan Battle Brawlers are action-figure warriors, that are tucked into spheres that pop open when they’re rolled onto a game card” (http://www.bakugan.com). I gather they also have a considerable market share among other bizarre Japanese animation cartoons and video games.

This week we added two new Bakugan (can anyone tell me if this is plural?) to our collection in the form of bribes/consolation prizes for swine flu immunizations (which, incidentally, have made us all sick). After playing with them for a while, I’ve decided Bakugan are AWESOME. They’re intricately engineered and magnetized, they transform from little balls to birds and dragons, and I just found out you can hook them to each other to make even bigger and more powerful agents of destruction.

And, unlike my treasured Madame A dolls, Bakugan don’t have to be dusted.