What do you NOT collect?

I do NOT collect stuffed animals. Oh sure, if you go upstairs in my house, look around and open the closets, it may appear otherwise. But they certainly don't belong to me! In my mind, the road to hell is probably lined with stuffed animals.

My mom tells me I was scared of them as a child--something about the furriness. She put a stuffed bear in the playpen with me and watched me crawl as fast as my little legs would pemit to the opposite corner, panic-stricken and refusing to go near it. When I was about 11 years old and we redecorated my bedroom, I decided it would be cute to have a cuddly stuffed animal on my bed and added one to my Christmas wish list. My mother bought a giant, hard-bodied pink and white stuffed poodle with long, rubbery black eyelashes. Nothing remotely cuddly about that! I should have specified a teddy bear....

After I had children of my own, they predictably received stuffed animals galore as gifts. They'd play with them for approximately ten minutes tops and then they'd end up in the closets, taking up prime real estate. I once embarked on a plan to surreptitiously spirit them away, one at a time, to the trash. Of course, my very first attempt was the day my youngest daughter happened to open the garbage can. Loudly protesting, she rescued the poor thing, lovingly placing it back in her closet to be further ignored.

High up on the wall in my oldest daughter's childhood bedroom is a shelf crammed full with her collection of smaller stuffed animals. Don't let their fluffy cuteness fool you--they're annoyingly evil, collecting dust and staring with beady, soulless eyes. The closet is even worse. My daughter's husband is extra skilled at those carnival games where you toss a ring or shoot a plastic gun. When they were dating he won many enormous stuffed animals as prizes, proudly presenting them to Michelle. She'd bring them home and, despite the fact that she's married and has a residence of her own now, there they still sit in the closet. There's an oh-so-natural gigantic purple monkey; a nature-defying colossal pink gorilla; a mammoth bright red mystery animal of some sort that, try as I might, I can't seem to identify; and an enormous, buck-toothed blue rabbit, among many others. I think the rabbit must be multiplying in there when I'm not looking. I swear the pile is inching ever closer to the ceiling...

And don't even get me started on those people who cram the rear decks of their cars with hideous stuffed animal menageries! I shudder to think of it.