I've fallen down a very expensive rabbit hole...

[IceRebel]

I was only looking for plastic animals for school topics, and now i've fallen head first down a Schleich rabbit (and other animals) hole.

Oh my goodness they're lovely and so detailed for such small figures, but the price

3 dinosaurs selling for £20+, a panda and her baby for nearly £10 delivered to my door.

Now i've seen them, other plastic animals just look crap and cheaply made in comparison. Yet if I ever bought any, I would be too tight to actually give them to the children to play with.

DartmoorDoughnut It sounds like your boys have a lovely collection.

Fishwifecalling It's lovely that you've kept it all for future little ones, although i'm envious of you having a large collection.

evaperonspoodle At least you tried The kangaroo and joey sounds adorable but likely to get lost in a school

I love my Smurf Schleich characters. They always make me smile.

We have the non cute variety here!!

I've got lots of these too, I tend to get a bit obsessional with ranges and end up buying a lot.

My ds wouldn't have done imaginative play, but I had bought lots of adults and babies and got him to match up the baby with its mummy. (The babies are totally adorable...) Or secretly choose an animal, walk it across a play-doh patch and we took turns guessing which animal it was by its tracks. He learned loads of animal species and where they lived, what they ate, all that kind of thing. The figures are very robust and would easily last well, even in a classroom environment.

I'm trying not to follow the links as I really don't need any more, but they are so well modelled and realistically painted that they're quite enticing even though they don't get played with any more. I'm not getting rid of them though, they cost a fortune and surely one day ds can sell them to raise a house deposit or something (I have a 20 litre tub full of them...) We used to get them from ELC and Smyths

Well. Individual artists price their 1/1s from £100-£a few grand. A rare set of two Steiff went for £10k at auction, a 1/1 I believe has reached £100,000+. Here's hoping our millennial Steiff will reach similar heights !

Oops. The rare Steiff sold last December.

I grew up with schliech from age 8 when they started to appear in the UK. I religiously completed the pony collections every year. They are so good! 1-2 of the older ones paint chipped but I played with them daily until about 13 and outside in the garden etc (ok I finally put them in a box in my cupboard when I was 15 ) I've let the accessories go (the rubbery tack didn't hold up) but I'm keeping the figures for my kids (ok for me to play with too). Well worth the investment.

The first Christmas I did an advent calendar for PFB DS1 I bought Schleich animals for it. 24 highly expensive animals. Nearly bankrupted myself. They do get played with a lot though.

DS2 sadly gets none of this extravagance!

icerebel, German speaker here, I would pronounce it Shhh-lie-sh

Schleich did not really exist when ds was small. I think it was just emerging. But they fuelled dd's horse obsession and she managed to collect almost every breed.
They now live in the loft, except for one which was the breed and colour of dd's horse so dd took a fine paintbrush to it, added in dhorse's markings and it now lives on her bedroom shelf, pride of place. (dd is now 16, for context)

I love my sloth!! He's hanging on the bathroom light-pull and he makes me smile every time I go for a wee

Spiderlight, I'm jealous!!

I have the full stables with various horses and barn animals, the whole set is amazing. So detailed with bales of hay, show jumps, cat for the roof, swans for the lake.

The kids ignore it.

I may spend a little too much time “tidying it” -and feeding the ponies-