I was going to do a parody bit about toy traffickers but then I figured it was in bad taste given the evils of human trafficking in the world.
Anyway, as we continue to clean out the house we’ve come across a lot of the toys my stepkids had when they were younger. I’m surprised at how many of them there are and that they’ve not migrated out of the house earlier than now. The kids are in their late thirties now. You’d think the kids would have taken them when they fled the roost or the toys would have been donated / sold in a garage sale by now.
The majority of the toys fall in two categories – stuffed animals and dolls. There are a few scattered other toys – an action figure here, a car or truck there – but mainly stuffed animals or dolls.
There is a kids resale shop in the area and my first thought is to take them there and see if we can get them to buy the toys. That way the toys would be out of the house, we would have made a little money, and we can get on with cleaning out the rest of the house.
The wife, on the other hand, immediately thinks of eBay. A lot more work, no guarantee they will sell (but then, no guarantee the resale shop will buy them), and all the toys are still sitting in the house taking up space. If they do sell, we’ve got to box them up and haul them to the post office.
Of course, we go with the wife’s plan.
My afternoon was spent taking photos of all the toys and measuring them for shipping boxes. There is a large amount of Barbie(tm) dolls, all naked, with frizzy hair. The wife had me wash all the Barbie’s hair so she could comb them out. It was preparing the Barbies that made me think of the human / toy trafficking connection. There was an episode of one of the crime shows my wife watches (I think it was Criminal Minds) where the villain was kidnapping girls, taking photos of them, posting them online for auction, then livestreaming the kidnap victim as people bid on them. We’ll be photographing all the dolls, putting the photos on eBay, and waiting for people to bid on them.
Yeah, my mind makes weird associations like that.
I suppose if the toys don’t sell on eBay by the end of April we can always take them off the site, then haul them over to the kids resale shop. If they won’t take the toys, I figure we donate them to charity.
The quest to get the house cleaned out continues, my Hordeling.
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