When our third child turned out to be a girl we did not rush out to buy dolls or any other girl toys for her - after all, if you have cars, trains, planes, bricks, why would you want anything else?

However, when we noticed that she started to cuddle, talk to, wrap up and put to bed some of the bigger vehicles we realised that (in her case at least) nature spectacularly triumphed over nurture. Since then we discovered the beautiful world of French and German Dolls – we simply love them and hope that you will too.