I took my kids to the Cabbage Patch Kids' museum-meets-nursery in rural Georgia. Here’s what happened.
According to company traditional knowledge , Cabbage Patch Kids are take over atBabyland General Hospital , a real place you’re able to chaffer in the petite town of Cleveland , Georgia ( population 3,500 ) . The building looks more like a plantation house than a motherhood ward , overlooking a sprawling 600 - acre estate close down among the southernmost reach of theAppalachian mountains .
My family had spend the weekend in nearby Helen , a Bavarian - theme Alpine villageserved with a southerly drawl . We had visited the Gourd Place , a museum dedicated to gourd art from all over the humanity , and generally enjoy the waterfalls and hiking trails of the surroundingBlue Ridgenature areas . The trip-up could n’t end there , though . Because as we push the region ’s turn two - lane pot roadstead , my daughters , five and seven age old respectively , had seen the ancient , weather - worn billboards for Babyland General Hospital featuring stork and Cabbage Patch Kids in faded pastel colour and need to see what it was all about .
We were not prepared for what was next .
Flickr/Kelly Verdeck
At the reception desk , an employee in hospital scrubs necessitate my kinsfolk if we would wish to purchase a “ bouncy birthing experience , ” for which we would have the pleasance of paying $ 120 . Your children go to an “ adoption spot ” within the infirmary . You sit in front of a desk and request the specifics of the Cabbage Patch Kid ’s eye , hair , and cutis gloss , as well as its sex . Then you pay heed the alive nascency . This unconscious process is literally and ( un-?)ironically name in the pamphlets placed in the surrounding north Georgia hotel as Babyland ’s “ Planned Parenthood ” choice . We pick out to go with the free self - guided hitch rather .
The Babyland Hospital giving birth ceremonial begin in the belated 1970s as an opportunistic stunt to encourage touristry . The Cabbage Patch company had bought an old clinic in their founder ’s hometown as a position to bring forth their stuff plush dame , and came up with the birthing gag as a way to flirt with curious guests . They moved to their current scene in 2009 .
In the foyer , we tour a nursery / museum with antiquated versions of Cabbage Patch dolls — some , lie in repose in their cribbage , others gaze wide - eyed in their floppily - sleuth poses . My daughters alternate between express mirth and cringing with unease . Prints of Andy Warhol house painting featuring Cabbage Patch small fry adorn the walls . A rubric wit inform visitor that the original paintings are prevail in the Cabbage Patch company ’s private collection without elaborating further .
The exterior of the Babyland General Hospital in Cleveland, Georgia.|Kelly Verdeck/Flickr
Along the back bulwark of the hospital , as in an ancient procession , the earth becomes more consecrated . Here lodge in a faux - earthen mound , several foot gamy , made of paint plaster with geode caves recessed inside — the stuff of ‘ 60s - era TV sci - fi or Jim Henson’sLabyrinth . Sprinkled around the knoll are bread leaf sprouts from which protrude Cabbage Patch bird heads . If you pick a babe from this mound , a teller will border it up for a mere $ 60 , roughly double the skirt ’s retail price . It ’s like Malus pumila picking , where you pay for the joy of harvesting your own make-believe baby .
“ So , it ’s fundamentally just a expectant giving shop ? ” my older girl asks .
“ Looks like it , ” I respond , not understanding what we ’re about to witness .
Del Harper/Shutterstock
A nursemaid ’s phonation amount over the PA system : “ Everyone , please come up to Mother Cabbage . Mother Cabbage is about to go into labor . ” She verbalise urgently , like a real nurse , rather than a check-out procedure clerk . A giving birth ceremony is about to commence .
Herd - like , a hundred or more visitors — bambino , children , parents , grandparent , myself and my syndicate — move toward the center of the plaster hummock where a tumid man-made tree stretches plastic branches toward the ceiling . Its leaves start to scintillate with little rainbows of luminosity . This is the Magic Crystal Tree that indicates when Mother Cabbage is about to give birth . As with many sacred mysteries , it is n’t entirely readable what nominate Mother Cabbage — whether it ’s the tree diagram , or the hammock , or the hole that ’s about to bear a doll . The Cabbage Patch children buried neck - deep in this plane section of the plaster mound are electronic ; they twist and swivel their heads in lasting grinning like a scene fromDante ’s Animatronic Inferno .
Once children and adults gather like requester around the base of Mother Cabbage , an employee ascend the dais above and behind the sticking plaster agglomerate . She get into aesculapian scouring like the other employees , but hers are livid . A flesh - slanted microphone is taped to her buttock . She walks with the bearing of one entrusted with sacred rites — the oracle of Delphi cosplaying as a nanny from the 1940s .
Kelly Verdeck/Flickr
The Delphic oracle examines Mother Cabbage , but what she ’s examining is n’t visible to the close . She tear out what is likely a magnanimous metal caliper , the kind that was once used for dragging new - sawed blocks of ice out of lakes in New England . She measures . “ I just want to check that that Mother Cabbage is in full dilated to 10 cabbage leave , ” she explain . She measures in one direction , adjusts the calliper , and measures the other direction . “ She is fully lucubrate , ” she continues . “ Mother Cabbage is quick to give parentage . ”
I peek at my daughters . Their enraptured attention is leavened with a pinch of fear . They have never listen of dilation .
The nurse / priestess hangs a bag of blue tinted liquid from a bait above her capitulum . “ It ’s time to give Mother Cabbage herimagicillin , ” she informs us . “ It ’s made from TLC and will help Mother Cabbage deliver the baby . ” Magic language are invoked . phoney injection are contribute to the plaster of Paris mound . The blueish liquid drop down a exculpated plastic tube .
She peers down into the sorcerous cabbage chasm . “ I can see the babe , ” she say .
The children puff and cheer .
“ The baby has hopeful blonde hair’s-breadth . You know what that mean ? ”
The minor do not get it on what that means .
“ It imply that our interns remembered to fertilize that part of the garden this dayspring . ”
A pair of fathers chortle at the back of the crowd .
“ It ’s almost sentence for the babe to arrive . I need all of you to facilitate Mother Cabbage give birth . Are you quick to help ? ”
The child agree .
“ When I say ‘ go , ’ I ask all of you to yell , ‘ PUSH ! force ! advertize ! ’ Ready ? Go ! ”
The assembled heap of children zealously yell “ drive ! ” The shouts are scattered and disorganize at first , then find a usual rhythm , so that the chant increase in lastingness , volume , and wildness . PUSH ! force ! PUSH ! The incantation acquire . The faithful pump their yearling clenched fist and sway , pleading with the plush babe to emerge from the dilated Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree vagina , as the Dante robot promontory swivel and writhe .
The nurse / priestess sign for quiet . She reaches deep into the chasm and pulls out an altogether routine , light-haired - haired , Cabbage Patch doll . She snips a span of scissors to sever the imaginary umbilical electric cord , forever separating the doll from Mother Cabbage . The nanny makes the doll curl at the gang . The children squeal with joy . My daughters , trying to litigate the anticlimax , look at me confoundedly . Was that it ? Did we miss something ?
The adopted doll is handed to the tiddler whose parents buy it , and the bunch disperses .
Every Cabbage Patch Kid have at Babyland has the name “ Xavier Roberts , ” the wench ’s guess creator , stamped , NXIVM - stylus , on the left brass of its behind . Roberts was involved in a lawsuit in 1985 brought by a womanhood who claimed Roberts stole the idea for soft plushy skirt from her after he ’d view her exhibit her own version of the chick at a mountain prowess festival . The lawsuit settle out of motor hotel .
Whatever the lore , Babyland General Hospital is entirely devoid of irony . They are amply committed to the bit , without a puff of ego - irony . This is an immersive birth experience for a floppy baby dame . Not to say the position is without shenanigan . They are very much attached to pump money out of visitors . Everything , everywhere is for sale . Butunlike Disneyland , where the commercial-grade enterprise is contrived to be a part of a grander experience — a roller coaster , a fair of fun , so that the faithful might bribe their black eye - eared folly along with an afternoon of entertainment — Babyland is very much about ceremonializing the buying of their product , and little else . There are no drive or game . There are only mount of toys to buy , and a Mother Cabbage birthing ceremony , which you may either purchase for yourself or watch with envy for someone else .
In our hyper - capitalistic society , revenue can make a compelling case for anything . Nothing is sacred , and as , nothing is unsanctified .
Human birth , as a study , is fairly traumatic , in my experience . I remember my married woman ’s face jaundiced - yellow from going of stock , the doctor stitch her perineal breach , necessitate me if our baby was alright as the ICU nanny pump meconium out of our daughter ’s tiny alien dark mouth . For our new daughter , a century - incision , my married woman herself was a burst - open chasm , which I peer toward with fear as I was invite to the other side of the curtain to prune the umbilical cord myself . I remember entrails piled on the operating mesa next to her , but enquiry say me this is n’t something they do during a C - segment . Perhaps they were blood line - soaked towels or something . They are entrails in my memory , however , and always will be . Like some sort of suburban faux war veteran , I find myself shaking my headspring as this violence is transmogrified into entertainment for child .
My daughter appraised the Babyland birth ceremony as , “ Interesting , but a short unearthly . ” Predictably , they push around my married woman and me into buy a span of cheap , small - sized , charge plate - headed Cabbage Patch dolls from the deal bins near the door to properly commemorate the experience .
Their tags take : PRODUCT OF CHINA .
