Culling The Herd

I started to cull the herd tonight.  I wish I had a picture, but close your eyes (well not yet...read the rest of this first) and picture it...

Little Miss and her entire 30lbs in her bed (which is just her crib with the side rail removed, so quite small).  Tucked in with not one, not two but three blankets (called Soft Blanket, Big Blanket and Other Blanket).  Joining her nightly are Big Monkey, Mommy Monkey, twin Baby Monkeys, Mini Monkey (creative with names don't ya think??), a panda bear with no name, Baby Cinderella, Little Baby, Other Baby, Baby Shawn, Violet the Dog, Grover (or Grovie as he's sometimes known), and not one but two singing Dora's.  If that sounds, ummm cozy, read on...

Recently she found out how to open her big toy box (which was jammed full of stuffies she's gotten since she was born)  So, to join her herd was Singing Giraffe, Baby Stella, and a couple of other random stuffies who I have forgotten at this moment!  Oh and then she found a monkey that DH gave me when we were dating and a Cabbage Patch doll I got for Christmas this year (a story for another day!)

So needless to say...it's jam packed in her bed.  I decided that something had to change when I went in to check on her one night and found her about two feet off of her mattress, laying on top of the whole pile!  And then I started to find other random things in there.  She has two fuzzy sweaters (really soft!) that don't yet fit her, but she drags them around like blankets.  They made their way into her hoard.  Then the jammies she had worn the night before would find their way into the mountain (maybe Grovie was cold?)  The last straw came when she wanted to start bringing hard toys into bed - pots and pans from her kitchen set, rubber balls, cars, books....Oye!!!  Houston, we have a problem!

I say the last straw, but really we just put the kibosh on the hard toys and clothing items.  Then, for the last several nights, we have woken at various times in the night to hear Violet the Dog singing at the top of her lungs (and she goes on and on!), or Dora expressing her love for Little Miss.

Enough was enough.

So tonight I started - while we do have to get rid of some of her stuffies, I will have to sort them when I have more time.  For tonight, as she got ready for bed and wandered around her room like a wee scavenger looking for new treasure, I told her that we had to take some of her babies out of her bed.  I wasn't sue how the conversation would go, but she was pretty good.

I began to hold up the less treasured babies, and out went the Cabbage Patch doll (whose name escapes me!), Violet the Dog (the serenading sealed his fate), one Dora doll (the other seems to have gone missing already...perhaps she knew what was going to happen!), and of course my monkey (leave my monkey alone kid!)

In the next few days I will pack up a bunch of the babies and put them away - maybe switch them out in a couple of months.  Her bed is still full (the Monkey family is huge) but at least I don't feel like she'll drown in plush and stuffing.  What a kid!