My first remembered toy

[telophase]

mrissa had to stay up all night last night for a sleep-deprivation test, and spent parts of the time answering random questions on LJ. Someone asked her what her first remembered toy was, and I commented with my first remembered toy. This is what I said:

My very first remembered toy was an enormous stuffed rat - about 2 or 2.5 foot high, I think - wearing a nightshirt and a nightcap. I got it before I could remember, and the story told me was that my grandparents were in town and that evening at dinner, someone told a joke or told everyone about a one-panel cartoon or something that invovled prisoners chained to the wall and had the punchline "That was a great rat!" They took me to a carnival in town, saw the stuffed rat, and History was Made.

Its name? Great Rat. I have no idea what happened to Great Rat, I don't think it survived the first move from that house.

ETA:

Another early remembered toy was from my years in Africa. Mom tells me I'd concevied a passion for a stuffed animal and reeeeeeally wanted one for Christmas, and this wasn't something you could find in the middle of the Serengeti Plains in the 70s. So she borrowed a crafts book that was making the rounds of the families on the research station at the time, and sewed the stuffed animal that was in there.

Which explains why I owned a triangular stuffed chicken.

Birdy Roostertail was a girl, I was quite sure, despite having a rooster's tail. The first incarnation was amde of felt, which didn't last very long and I wore a hole in it, so Mom remade Birdy into Birdy Roostertail II, recycling her tail, eyes, wings, and beak from the original, and using a red checked cotton fabric for the new body. You could always get red and red-patterned fabric in the Serengeti, since the Maasai people loved red. Mom tells me that one of our European neighbors bougth some lovely red checked fabric and made tablecloths from it, and then realized that the well-dressed Maasai was wearing her tablecoth fabric that season. :)