I still have all my oldest soft toys. The first thing I ever had was a really soft yellow knitted blanket but it ended up literally falling apart and I think it ended up getting thrown away. The oldest soft toy I have is from a kids show I loved as a baby but it has clothing stitched to it that's made of that really gross smooth fabric that gives your teeth the same feeling as nails on a blackboard and reminds me of my grandma for some reason. I have a non teddy bear bear too that I first got when I was 4-5ish and it kinda has a B shape, it's one that lays perfectly flat. About a decade later I randomly got a platypus plushie with the same size and shape from a completely different place and company and so they now go together like ᗺB. I also have a pokemon plush that I found laying in the mud in a park when I would have been about 7ish maybe, for some reason I picked it up and wanted to keep it despite it being all fucked up and torn. So we took it home and I remember me and my dad borrowing a pressure washer for the day and we pressure washed all the mud off. Then I took it to my grandma and asked her to make a replacement tail because it had been torn off, I tried to show her what the tail looked like but she didn't really understand the internet at all and in hindsight it's a way too complex shape to expect someone to be able to just knit a new one. So instead it has this dumpy little bob tail made of wool that's weave is just loose enough to see the stuffing inside and the wool colour is the same colour in the way that like a landlord would look at white paint.
My favourite one is one of these animals that have been deemed an autism animal but I got it before it was an autism animal and before autism was cool anyway. This stupid thing has been to more places than people I know, I think 7 countries. It comes with me if I ever go anywhere on holiday, half the time it takes up more room in my bag than my clothes and stuff. It's been with me to hospital and it came with me when I went on holiday to meet my now wife, must be true love if a grown man taking his soft toy on a first date doesn't scare you off right? When I got home I realised that I'd taken more photos of this plush in front of landmarks than I had of the woman I went there to meet, much less photos of us together. It's that perfect size where it's large enough to use as a makeshift pillow but still just about small enough to be portable. It's probably my most valued possession and one of the few things I own that I would ever call actually irreplaceable. I've bought maybe 20+ of the same animal and passed up many more than that trying to find an identical one but none of them really do it for me. The fur is different or the proportions are wrong or it'll have something dumb like those pointy plastic whiskers. And none of them have the slightly fucked up face that's rotated about 30* that probably only comes from two decades of being shoved into suitcases or washing machines. I keep thinking that I should just go and get it restuffed because he's kinda flat now but there's something endearing about how the dense stuffing feels and honestly I'm just kinda scared that someone will fuck up one of the things that no matter what I do I could never replace. It was one of the only things that I was really worried about when we got a puppy, she can chew the tables and my leg and piss on the floor if she wants to but absolutely is not allowed anywhere near any of my plushies especially this one.
