Illness and Injury

The Marmot Girls have always been fascinated by illness and injury. Even before Madame 5-yr-old broke her arm last week, Madame 4 would wet sheets of paper and wrap them around various limbs as casts. Now that there's an actual broken bone in the family, though, the girls have gone into overdrive. This is just a selection of the toys that have been bound up with tape casts.

I dressed some of the more scandalously naked dolls, because, naturally, all of the skanky/fluffy Barbie outfits have disappeared and no toys ever wear clothes at the Marmot House. (I found some of my old Strawberry Shortcake dolls at my parents' house awhile back and they were all wearing dresses I had made them out of toilet paper and tape a million years ago.) I'm thinking the sheep's ribs are broken?

The marmots are all about broken bones at the moment, but they used to be really big on general illness. They had a doctor's kit when they were still toddlers and knew all the instruments by name, including the sphygmomanometer. And when Madame 4-yr-old was only 2, she refused to answer to any name other than Dr. DeSoto and would rush around the house calling out, "The doctor is coming!"

When I spent a summer in Russia during college, I lived with a babushka who was also fascinated with illness. She always expected me to be sick because I went out to the theater in dress shoes that didn't cover the backs of my heels (in July). She often urged me to borrow some of her wool socks to wear with my dresses so that I wouldn't catch my death. When I did catch a summer cold, I never ever admitted to it, because I knew she would try to heal me by sticking garlic up my nose. After three months, she finally told me that Americans must be tougher than Russians because there was really no way I could have stayed healthy that long with my terrible choice of dress shoes.