At the age of 30, quite the last thing I imagined myself doing was to spend an evening weeping bitterly because I thought I’d broken my dolly. But that’s what happened last night.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been humming and haahing about whether or not I should take the plunge and give my RBL girls sleep-eyes  – ‘RBL’ refers to the ‘radiance’ face mold which can be opened up easily, compared to the ’superior’ face mold (SBL) or the original Takara Neo Blythe face mold (EBL/BL), where the ‘E’ stands for ‘excellent’ referring to the new non-bendy body on a BL face mold…..got that?!. Right, ok then.  Of my girls, I currently have four who are RBLs: Paige, Rachael, Cecily and Fleur. Now obviously I don’t have a favourite girl, how could I possibly, but as you all know, Paige and I are particularly close as she’s been a part of my life for the longest. Therefore in order not to risk any of my girls feeling like an experimental guineapig for customisation, I promised myself that I would never ever risk doing *anything* to *any* my girls unless I was willing to do the same thing to Paige. So Paige was going to be the first to get sleep-eyes.

Unfortunately to do this properly it’s a procedure that involves open head surgery, but Fliss has posted excellent instructions for how to open up an RBL head on her blog. These instructions are great…up until I could only get one side of Paige’s faceplates apart (nothing at all to do with Fliss’ method, it clearly worked as I managed to do it on one side). But no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t get the other side to pop open. And then I looked at my poor little dolly with her beautiful eyes closed and with a big gap down one side of her face, and I panicked that that she would never be the same again and that her little life was slipping away from me and that it was all my fault and that I had hurt her so much. And then I began to cry.

Most people would see this as being completely irrational, but as everyone knows I’m very attached to my dear, sweet plastic girl. It was at this moment that Young Father walked into the conservatory and found me sobbing pathetically and very kindly offered to try to fix her as that’s what daddys do. But he tried and couldn’t open her either. Maybe we were pressing her ears in the wrong place? Or just weren’t being strong enough? Probably. So after a little breather, and a few panicked flickrmails to Fliss who said all the right things and even offered to admit her to Pudsey General Dolly Hospital if it all went completely wrong (so kind) I tried again, but in doing so clicked the open side of her face back together again. At this point I just put all the screws back in again and took a deep breath, vowed NEVER to put myself through any such Blythe trauma EVER again, and then spent the next hour fishing around with a crochet hook, through the little hole in the back of her head, trying to retrieve the spring that makes her eyes open. But instead of clipping it back onto her back faceplate, I instead attached it to a little string that I can pull, thereby getting the whole sleepeyes effect without actually having to open her head after all

I let Paige sleep next to me in bed last night to recuperate. I even wrapped her in my one and only extra special cashmere cardigan  so that she would feel extra special herself.

After a bit of a tension headache last night, she felt a lot better this morning and is still the same old Paige. But even though we’re thrilled to pieces with how it turned out in the end, I don’t think I’ll try to do any more major head opening surgeries on my girls again by myself in the near future. I don’t think I have the emotional strength. All of my girls are far too precious to me to risk hurting them. You have to understand, Blythes aren’t like just any old regular dollies, they are special