Another year quickly draws to an end! It took me quite a while to gather and reflect all my toy thoughts for 2011. What can I say? That 2011 is basically just another period of yet more mindless pursuit of more toys to add to my already overpopulated collection, spread over 12 months! So am I happy with how the year went for me?
Well I have long wanted to quit this toy collecting hobby, but I obviously didn’t succeed. This is mainly because I haven’t really found something else to take its place.
Ever since I started blogging about toys in Dec 2009, I had been gradually downsizing the toy collections that I had lost interest in and I did managed to sell off a sizeable part of my collection. However along the way, I also bought new toys that caught my interest. Fortunately the new toys were fewer in numbers and the new toy purchases were spaced much further apart than before. Hence overall, my toy collecting pace has slowed down by a lot, which is good!
G4 My Little Pony
This has been a very exciting year for collecting G4 My Little Pony - Friendship is Magic (FiM) toys, ever since they started appearing in local departmental stores in Q1 of 2011. My fellow local pony collectors and I had been following the news and were envious of the early retail release of G4 pony toys in the US in 2010. We were then naturally very ecstatic to find them here as well and wasted no time buying the “mane 6″ pony characters, way before the local kids and other fans were introduced to these ponies when the FiM cartoon was screened on Okto Channel in Oct 2011.
LEGO
The local retail release of the 2nd series of LEGO Kingdoms sets in July this year revived my waned interest in LEGO and got me excited for a while, until I finished building them all and stored them aside in boxes. I also became briefly interested in the new LEGO Aliens Conquest sets and added them to my collection too. Now I’m still wondering if that was a good idea. I still like them, but I feel guilty that I strayed from my LEGO collecting goals of focusing on medieval LEGO sets only…
Masters of the Universe Classics (MOTUC)
2011 marked the year that I finally completed my modest collection of MOTUC figures that I intend to collect. I have the MOTUC He-Man, Battle Cat, Adora, She-Ra V1, She-Ra V2 and the massive Swift Wind (added in Nov) at last! Maybe if Mattel makes Adora’s horse Spirit, I will get him too in 2012 or whenever he gets released. These are very expensive toys which I bought as MOCs and MIBs, so they are all I can afford to have, for now.
Unanticipated Gundam Invasion!

Just as I have been painstakingly reducing my massive toy collection over the year, this is also the untimely period when my husband plunged into the “rapid growth” stage of collecting Gundam model kits!
I blame myself for letting him accompany me to the toy sections of departmental stores whenever I popped in to check out the latest ponies and other toy releases to blog about. He somehow revived his childhood interest in Gundam and in the last 2 months, it had been a downward spiral for his $$ and my emotions!
He keeps reassuring me that he only buys them at massive discounts from both retail stores and online sellers, but he doesn’t seem to detect my built up stress at seeing the more than 30 boxes of unassembled MIB Gundams cluttering up our room!
I had strived so hard for the year to clutter clear my home and room, only to see other people’s clutter build up all over again! And if you collect Gundam, you will know that each HG & MG model kit can take up to a week or more to build, assuming that you can only build on weekday nights after work and on weekends if you don’t go out.
My thoughts for 2012
All I can say for now is that I better find a new non-physical item collecting hobby in 2012 and further cut down on impulse toy purchases. Recession is coming again and I can’t guarantee if my income will remain the same in the coming months, much less for the whole year. I have to cut down on monthly expenses and set aside more funds and savings for rainy days, and perhaps a new addition to the family.
Oh gosh, just typing this paragraph alone is starting to stress me up! But don’t let me dissuade you from your own toy collecting goals, for everyone has different targets for the new year. So you go on and pursue yours while I carry out mine. Adieu 2011 and Happy New Year 2012!