When I was a kid, everyone thought I was weird. I had over forty My Little Ponies; they took baths with me, came on holiday with me, and lived in splendidly-appointed accommodation constructed of the best plastic Hasbro could come up with that year.
Now, everyone had ponies in the eighties. And you could tell a lot about a little girl from the way she treated them. Your artistic child would express its creative urges by *ahem* "decorating" her ponies. Your budding hairdresser would crimp them up, trim their manes into those oh-so-fashionable mohawks, and so on.
I, on the other hand, was destined to become something rather less
outgoing: a geek. So what I did was carefully clean and maintain my
ponies, religiously learn their names, sort them neatly into storage
accommodation whenever they came travelling with me and generally
treat them as if I didn't really know what toys were for. It was the
sort of thing that would have had primary school teachers shaking
their heads and trying to encourage me to break something expensive
outside in the sunshine instead.
Strangely enough, now that they're collectable and in such lovely condition too, I'm remarkably happy to have been a weird child :)
This summer I finally got round to rescuing my old ponies from my parents' attic (I don't know how to thank my stepdad for deciding they might be collectable and refusing to throw them away!). I haven't had time to clean them all up yet and don't have anywhere to store them other than tucked away in boxes, but there are photos of a few of the highlights (in my mind, at least :) and it's nice to know they have as much value in other ways as they do sentimentally!
Chibi ponies from the Misty Mountain nursery