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Jessi and I made our first trip to Babyland General Hospital in Cleveland, Georgia. For those of you who don’t know, this is the home of the Cabbage Patch Kids. Specifically, Jessi and I collect the soft face Cabbage Patch Kids, which were (and still are) the basis of the mass market vinyl faced toys that were so big in the 1980’s. Anyway, the soft face kids are all one-of-a-kind, hand-made treasures, and every year they celebrate the collecting community with a convention in Cleveland called Spring Event.

We spent two days hanging out with other collectors and waiting for the chance to adopt (you don’t buy these kids–you adopt them) a Spring Event kid. There were only 250 of the Spring Event kids made this year, and more than 100 collectors in attendance, so the competition was intense to find that special kid to adopt. What makes the Spring Event kids unique this year were special hair styles (including both yarn and color), special clothes, and special names (all boys had names starting with J and a middle name of Jambo — all girls had a first name starting with J and middle name of Ree—get it? Jambo-Ree). I wanted to get a boy, which was even tougher, since there were only thirty boys made out of the 250.

To distribute the kids, they had as all line up outside the theatre where the event was taking place, and on cue, we all “walked” in to pick up our kid. The challenge was that you could only pick up one kid at a time, and everyone was choosing their kids all at once. Jessi and I decided we would both try to get boys, since it seemed that if there were two of us looking for boys, we would hopefully get one. It turned out that we got two boys, and rather unique ones at that. We managed to pick two of less than ten boys made that had curly hair (we actually have only seen five).

We actually picked up a few more kids, as well. We picked up two more Spring Event kids, both girls this time. Jessi really wanted a Honey skinned kid, so we managed to find an adorable one for her to love. She also found an equally loveable vanilla skinned kid, so we ended up with a total of four Spring Event kids. Of course, we couldn’t control ourselves, so we got a few more kids well, namely three “floor” kids from the Babyland General Hospital, a newborn from Babyland General, and two Spring Event “Sidekick” kids. The wallet was hit hard…. =). There’s plenty more pictures of the trip in our photo galleries. You’ll find this trip in the Spring Event 2005 gallery. There’s no captions yet, but I will be adding them as the week goes along.