Creepy Baby had a hard, peach-colored plastic head and extremities, but a plush torso. Thus, her weight distribution was such that her soft middle turned her limbs and head into hard projectiles when swung about, which they often were. Creepy Baby also had a far-away, vacant expression on a too-realistic looking face that made me deeply uneasy.
But let's be honest, it's not just dolls; human kids are inherently a little creepy too. If they weren't, there wouldn't be movies like The Shining, The Bad Seed, The Omen, and Rosemary's Baby. Although if you want the truth, the scariest thing about that last one was how cheap the Upper West Side of Manhattan was in the 70's, to the point where a starving actor desperate and poor enough to make a literal deal with the actual devil could live in a 2,000 square foot apartment on 76th and Columbus.
But that's a whole other story.
The worst is when your own kids creep you out. I find this happens most frequently in the middle of the night, or very early in the morning. I will be in a deep sleep, maybe having a vivid and random dream about riding a train to Norway with a giraffe or something.
All of a sudden I'll roll over, open my eyes, and on the side of the bed at EXACT eye level with my head is a child just staring at me, perhaps poking me gently, and muttering in a rhythmic and slightly urgent stocatto: "momomomomomom."
Then I scream, the kid cries, and I have to tell them not to come stand beside my bedside and have me open my eyes to their faces within two inches of mine, or it will be REDRUM for one of us.
It's not the being woken up itself I mind; although that sucks of course, I accept it as part of the parenting deal. It's the creepy manner of the awakening with which I take issue.
It's poetic justice in a way, because I used to pry my own mother's eyeballs open firmly with two fingers at 6:00 a.m. on Sundays, the only day of the week she didn't work for ten hours straight.
What goes around comes around.
