During the month of January, I will be posting (tentatively) one post every day as part of the #bloganuary challenge
Today’s Prompt: What is a treasure that’s been lost?

My parents were always a bit ahead of their time. A few examples come to my mind, like the fact that all my baby clothes and my room were red, my middle sister’s yellow and my little sister’s green. Three girls, no pink. Also, when I think about the toys we had growing up it becomes even more obvious. Being born in the ’80s and ’90s while most girls had only dolls and kitchen-related toys, we had everything from Barbie dolls to Transformers, from stuffed animals to a toy toolbox (yes, with a hammer, saw, screwdriver, etc) and Star Wars things. I guess, back then, my parents already had in mind the idea that toys should have no gender. I’m not sure if it was a conscious decision. But whatever it was, I have never heard from them I could not play with something because it was for boys or that I could not do something because I was a girl.

So yeah, we had dolls and stuffed animals but also Legos, Playmobil, a huge “collection” of cars, we had kitchen stuff, we had it all (hello, privileges again). We also had a chemistry game called Alquimia (Alchemy) that I LOVED. It was basically a bunch of test tubes, a bunch of different substances and cards where you could find the directions on experiments for you to try. You could mix up things and get different chemical reactions… it was amazing.

Being the weird kid I was ( #stayweird <3 ) I loved the Cuca, which was a crocodile-like witch and the “villain” of a children’s TV show called Sitio do Pica Pau Amarelo (in Brazil). My mom says the kids used to be afraid of the Cuca but I used to cry when it did not show up in an episode. And I had multiple Cuca dolls. I was about 3 yo.

Another toy I used to absolutely love was an alien called Neb. You could perform surgeries and remove its organs and put them back, suture it, it had “blood cells” and all. Really weird but I simply loved it.

I was also a big fan of Legos and Playmobil and one of my favourite memories as a kid is the fact that my father used to take vacation days the same time we had our school breaks and we used to spend days building an entire city made of Lego on top of the dining table and then we had to eat in the kitchen for a month because the dining table was completely taken over by toys. Also the endless Family Nintendo championships (Mario Kart, Tetris, Dr. Mario).

I’m sure all that made a huge difference in the person I am, and how I see the world. Even though the world (society in general) says otherwise, and that also has an impact on how we see ourselves, having parents who always encouraged us to do what we wanted to do, never said we were not capable of something certainly made us a bit braver.

So, thanks, mom and dad!