The first toys I can remember playing with are the old wooden Fisher Price “Little People”.  I know I had dolls and stuffed animals, but I remember so many adventures with Zach and that Little People camper.  There was a mother and a father, a bad boy (because his hat was on sideways) named Butch, a good boy in a yellow hat we named Zach, a girl in a green dress we named Heidi, and a girl with yellow hair and a red dress whose name tended to change.  There were also two dogs, identical except that one of them was missing an ear; I’m not sure if WE broke the ear or what, but I don’t remember that dog NOT having a broken ear.  The dog with the broken ear was, obviously, older, and so we named him Pepper after grandpa’s black terrier-wirehair-mutt-like dog.  Pepper was older than our malamute, Sammy, so we named the other dog Sammy.  We had so much fun playing with those Little People!  Their camper had a big rowboat on the top and the truck made a wonderful clicking noise when we pushed it around; the truck also had a little gizmo in the front seats that would bounce the people up and down.

Later on, our cousin Darci gave us her Little People castle, which had everything a castle needed:  a dragon, a carriage, two horses, a king, a queen, a prince, and a princess, not to mention the knave (he had a Robin Hood-type hat and a rather rakish Errol Flynn mustache) and all the fun furniture.  The carriage is long gone and the beds’ foam died several years ago, but the horses are more or less intact.  The castle had a dungeon with a trap door, a secret panel behind the fireplace, and a hidden chamber behind the stairs.  It also had a drawbridge and towers.  We’d sometimes try to saddle the pink dragon, but it never really worked because the saddle was made for the horses.  There are a lot of pretends inside that castle, and it was fun to watch various children over the years play with it and have some of the same pretends.  I hope it’s always at mom and dad’s house.

I also had sewing cards (perforated, with yarn ribbons to weave in and out), My Little Pony, various Barbies, stuffed animals, and the Playmobil hospital set (Zach had the cowboy and Indian set, and, unlike the Little People, we’d often combine the two sets into one huge set!), as well as various dolls, blocks, and Hot Wheels.

We may not have ever gotten a Lite Brite, but we had a lot of fun using our imaginations to tell stories with the toys we had…and sometimes Mom and Dad would let us leave our set-ups out for several days at a time!