Tee-Niny.

Disclaimer: I somehow managed to use the words Penis, Vagina and Tits in this post. If you are easily offended by these words, please close your browser immediately.
 
In other parts of the world, a very small object may be considered "tiny." Not so in The South. Down here the very tiniest of objects are known as "Tee-niny." Say it with me, now: Tee. Niny.

For example, I'm about to have a baby here in a couple of weeks. And rest assured, someone at some point will state the following: "Ohhh, lookie thar. Ain't he a sweetie? He sure is a tee-niny little thang." (For my vagina's sake, I'm really hoping he is as tee-niny as possible.)

The use of the word tee-niny has fallen out of my personal vocabulary, thanks, in part, to my being married to a neutral accented feller. However, this gem of a word is alive and well with my mother and sister. Thank goodness!

I've had an obsession with tee-niny objects my entire adulthood. Show me a miniature ANYTHING and I will squeal with delight. Guaranteed. The bigger deal, here, is that I'm not generally a squeal-y type person. Quite the opposite, in fact. Hardly anything gets me excited, but show me a miniature tea set and I'll damn near faint. In fact, I damn near fainted when I saw this most amazing hand-crafted miniature mouse tree house on the Internet today. Just look at the thousands of meticulous miniature details!!! I'm dying.

And it got me thinkin'...Why do I find such large amounts of joy in the smallest of objects? (And don't go making any jokes about Sean's penis. It's huge, by the way.) I think my love of all things tee-niny stems mostly from the world of Barbie. Sister and I must've had HUNDREDS of Barbies...and Barbie's clothes, shoes, a fleet of vehicles, houses and furniture...She and I were recently reminiscing about our passion for playing Barbies. It was a daily activity for us, and our Barbie story lines would last for weeks at a time.

While I loved my Barbies and everything, I was always very jealous of this girl in my neighborhood named Cate Morris. Because Cate had a dollhouse. A REAL Victorian dollhouse with tiny little shingles and tiny little furniture and tee-niny little doll plates to sit atop the doll dining room table. My mind would get lost as I stared into that dollhouse. It was full-on mesmerizing to me, but Cate didn't seem to appreciate her dollhouse at all! I would shake my head in disgust and think, "If only it were mine..." (I felt the same way about her American Girl Doll Samantha and her NES power pad, too).

The dollhouse made my Barbies look like Mrs. King Kong, the giant plastic woman who came to kill you with her thunder thighs and torpedo tits. And nobody wants that.

I never had a dollhouse of my own, but let me tell you about one tee-niny set of toys that I did have -- The Cottontail Rabbit Family from Calico Critters. My sister had the Milky Mouse Family. Or maybe it was the other way around. Regardless, we had the bunnies and we had the mice. Not only am I amazed that I was able to recall us having these things, I'm also amazed that they still sell them! I probably shouldn't tell you that I just spent the past 15 minutes gushing over the Calico Critters collection of homes on their website. If I'm not careful, I'll end up with my very own TLC show: My Miniature Obsession. Now, who wants to buy me the Meerkat Triplets for Christmas? Anyone??