It's a Scooby Doo Thing

I collect Snoopy. If I see something Snoopy in the stores, I like to look at it and maybe even buy it. My collection has grown quite a bit over the years, but I've had to say "no" to a lot of things simply because I don't have room for it. And there is a LOT of Snoopy stuff out there.

My daughter collects Scooby Doo. Collects may not be the right word. Let's see...how to describe this? She hoards Scooby Doo. For her last birthday, we got her all Scooby Doo stuff - even down to the sugar cake decorations. She still has them. Yes, six months after her birthday, there are still little sugar heads of Scooby Doo in her special wooden box.

I thought perhaps it was just a phase. After all, she liked the Disney Princesses for awhile, then Clifford the Big Red Dog was a hit for a few months, and Hello Kitty also caught her attention for a few months. But none of them lasted as long as Scooby Doo.

At last count, she had accumulated more than 50 Scooby Doo books in the past two years. GoodWill, garage sales, Barnes & Noble, and school book orders (not to mention library book sales!) have contributed to this huge amount. And then there's the movies. She has at least six or seven Scooby Doo DVD's and probably as many VHS tapes. She has Scooby Doo stuffed animals, Christmas ornaments, wrapping paper, and well, anything else that she can find that has Scooby Doo. We even found a Scooby Doo Halloween costume for her this year and she absolutely loved it - even to the point of wearing it before Halloween and playing outside. She's such an animal lover that putting on the costume of a dog was perfect play time!

I've asked her if she will still like Scooby Doo when she's older. "I will love Scooby Doo forever," she tells me. At this point, I'm inclined to believe here. We're going on two years of the Scooby Doo phase and I think it's really not a phase at all. My brother told me last night that he's never seen a kid so taken with one thing for so long. I've always loved Snoopy and had Snoopy stuff growing up. Never to the level that my daughter has, of course. She's going to have quite the collection by the time she hits high school!