Did you play with dolls as child?

[Kittie]

I didn't actually play with dolls as su ch but played with PAPER DRESSING DOLLS where you drssed them with different dresses. I was the baby of the family and adored by my big sister who was to become a lifelonG close friend until her death 23 years. I use to CD a bit then though! & still do

[DonnaT]

Not that I recall. No sisters, so no access. My grandmother collected dolls, however. I have no idea what happened to them after she passed away.

[Leeza]

There times I played with my sister's dolls when we were playing.

She also played with my trucks.

Leeza

[Davita]

I played a little bit with dolls. I had a girlfriend so we played girl things like house and some others.

I was just as comfortable playing with girls as I was with a boy. I just didn't like to be around lots of boys.

[Cindy Louise]

Only Action Man. I used to have a drawer full of different outfits/uniforms for him, so that's the closest I came to dolls. My sister was always a tomboy and used to dress her dolls in his outfits.

[Karen]

There was a girl living next door to me and in the summer months
we played alot in her back yard. It was most always playing with
her dolls but when we played "house" I HAD to be the Daddy (of
course) and she was the Mom. I jokenly tried to switch our roles
but of course she would not do it.

I had more fun playing with her and on many occasions, 2 other girls
came over and we would always have a good time. As I got older,
I trully did miss those times.

[April Rose]

I had a boy doll. Occasionally I would play with the neighborhood girls with my boy doll and their girl dolls, but not often. Once, one of the girls put a dress on my boy doll, and I got mad and left. Hit too close to home, I guess.

[Susan]

Very rarely as I have no sisters. the only time I got to touch a doll was when visiting friends houses.

[Carolynn]

Yeah. I got a doll from the midwife who attended my birth when I was nearly 2 y.o. She was a drinking/wetting doll, but not a sleepy eyes one. I would "feed" her and change her diaper and cuddle and play with her. I loved airplanes and all things they flew by soaring, and would lie on the ground and watch hawks and buzzards as they glided about and fantasize about being them wondering what they would be seeing. I bought some toy aiplanes, and my doll, Angel (the nice lady who gave her to me said she would be my guardian angel, so Angel she became) and I would "fly" in them for hours at a time. When I played with Angel, I would wrap a t-towel around my waist and tuck it into my underwear, and use another for hair, and be "mommy". My mother, Aunt and Uncle, and grandfather made no comment, and my older girl cousin my mom babysat played too.

We moved from my Grandfather and Aunt's house at the end of WWII when my father came home, and we lived across the street from a sweet little girl named Sondra, who was near my age. She had lots of dolls, and I would take Angel to her house and we played dolls and I had some of her clothes for Angel to wear. We made some others when we were 6 and 7, with her mom's help. We also played dress-up. When I had my surgery "adjusting" my atypical uretha when I was 7 and was not supposed to run aroung outside for a few weeks (it was actually more involved that just the uretha, as it was a hypospadia, at least that had to be "corrected), she would bring her paperdoll books over and we would play with them, tracing out the clothes on other sheets of paper and coloring them with crayons or colored pencils, to add variety. My father was working during those times. He bought me pistols as boy toys. Only my male cousins had any of those, and they were only used when I was at my grandparents with them.

My father wanted me to be rid of Angel by the time I was 7, and took the opportunity of our move to a new town to let her find her assisted way into a burn barrel. Sondra and I suspected since he tried before and I had hidden her in my "secret hiding place", and found the side of her face in the barrel after burning. I never trusted my father that much after that, as both he and my mother lied about what was done.

He bought me an electric train and construction equipment, and a boys bike that was actually too big for me (but he expected me to grow into it), as he felt those were boy's toys. It was a year before I could safely ride the silly thing. I discovered that the train had accessories like houses and I turned two of them into doll houses with curtains and second floors, using the little S-scale figures suitably modified to sit and lay as my house people, and furniture I made of balsa wood, paint and cloth scraps. I made sure he didn't know about them. I didn't have the kind of girlfriends in the new town I did in the old, so without a doll and with my purchases monitored, I was very limited. Then my sister was born and I was jealous of her dolls and other toys, but I was 11 by then. I gave the construction toys away to younger cousins when I was in highschool. There were un-played with, mostly.

Carolynn

[Absaroka]

I had no interest in dolls but my brother and I had very elaborate games we played with our stuffed animals. I guess you could consider them to be animal dolls. I think we assigned most of them masculine gender.

Does arranging tiny people on the model railroad set count as playing with dolls?

Zari

[Carolynn]

See my post above, last paragraph about the railroad people. Did you make up stories about them or just put them out like pieces of scenery? If the former, then yeah, maybe so. If the latter, then probably not.

[KimberlyS]

I do not ever remember playing with dolls specifically. I did have a lot of stuffed animals growing up but did not play with them much they just sat on the bed during the day. I do remember playing house with the two girls down the street some times when younger mixed with doing guy things and riding my bicycle a lot. Then we moved to a place in the country and had lots of boy adventurous things to do.

kimberlys - cd
joe in a skirt

[Absaroka]

By the time I had scale model people I was an adult. They actually represented my children and their friends. They were congregated around an old boxcar and were "the boxcar children". The girls were sitting on rocks fishing while the boys had wandered into town to procure food. They would all take great delight in pointing out which figurine was them, and on the bottoms of the houses I wrote the names of who lived where before they all ran away to live in the boxcar.

As an aside, this was one of my eldest's first experiences with what I call institutional racism. She was shocked that there were no scale model Black people. Unfortunately, by age 7 her Black friends were unsurprised.

I wound up repainting all the figurines, at which time some of them had a race change.

[Mary Sanders]

I find this question very interesting. Yes! I did play with dolls when I was little. I don't remember anything about playing with dolls But, there are home movies of me openning christmas presents which were mostly dolls and girls toys. It looks like I was about 3 years old. I don't know if they are what I wanted or what my mother wanted for me. When I was older maybe 6 or 7 I remember my mother telling me "You should have been my little girl. You have wounderful nerturing qualities." I also remember thinking to myself "Why can't I be your little girl?"

My mother has long since passed away. If she was alive today I wouldn't hesitate to discuss my feminine side with her. My sister told me that my mother told her that when I was born she didn't want another boy and she would have been happier if it was my sister instead. This was a shock to me and I don't really know what to make of it. Do you think my mother had an influence on me being a crossdresser ?

[Susan]

Mary

I really don't know. My mother wanted a little girl and had even picked the name Claire for her before I came along and spoiled things. She never did get her wish as I have two younger brothers.