I'm in the market for a babydoll.  My friend's little girl is turning 5 and she wants a babydoll for her birthday.

Babydolls have changed a lot recently, it seems.  When I was a kid, we had the stiff-limbed, hard plastic variety with the frizzy nylon hair, eyes that rolled shut whenever you laid them on their backs and the straight-pipe digestive tract...a hole for her mouth, and a hole in her crotch so that whatever you put in her mouth dribbled almost immediately out the other end.

When my daughter was a little girl, 'newborn' dollies were all the rage.  These things were softer, yes, but boy were they ugly! All wrinkly...came with a hospital tag on their wrist and a bandage on their umbilical stump.  They also came in different colors - black or white.  No tan, or yellow, or red...but at least now we had some ethnicity in our children's playthings. 

Water babies were also popular back then.  Basically they were a babydoll 'skin'..they had a plug on their butts and you filled them up with warm tap water.  It was supposed to give them a more life-like feel..all I know is that they had a tendency to leak, and that Shea's brother delighted in poking holes in Shea's 'baby' and making her bleed.

Now though.....we've gone reality crazy.  You can get dollies that have the appropriate anatomy for their gender, dollies that poop as well as pee...dollies that are programmed to cry indiscriminately, dollies whose mouths move when you put a bottle or a pacifier (dummy for our British and Aussie friends) in them, dollies that burp and coo and fart and giggle.....dollies that spit up and dollies that crawl, dollies in all kinds of colors and ethnicities, and even dollies with different facial expressions.  It's getting so that you don't even need to have a child or get your hands on a real live infant in order to learn parenting skills, you can just go down to the local toy store and pick yourself up a ready-made for-all-intents-and-purposes-good-as-the-real-thing dolly.

With that in mind, I have some suggestions for toy makers.  I think we need these little darlings to hit the shelves of toy stores in time for christmas this year:

'Sally Sick-o', a doll who throws up everthing you put into her, has bouts of explosive diarrhea that diapers can't contain and who cries all day and all night.

'Infectious Ian' who sporadically breaks out in a rash that no-one can explain, runs a slight fever and has a cough.

'Obstinate Olivia' who's first (and only) word is "no" and who refuses..well, who refuses everything.

'Diddling Derek' who insists on examining his genitalia every time you change his diaper.

'Mobile Marcus' who gets into, underneath, behind, and on top of your furniture.

'Naked Natalie' who likes to rip of all her clothes and run around bare-assed..any time, anywhere.

I'm waiting for 'Ultra baby' who does all of the above.  As soon as they come out with one of those, I'm getting one for Shea.

*sigh*...I think little Morgan might be getting a book for her birthday this year instead.......