all the beanie baby collectors will start to die soon
Like thousands of late to middle aged women, my kids love beanie babies. Lucky for me, I haven't had to actually "buy" many beanie babies. Instead, my mom brings out large bags of bears and dogs and buzzards and lambs and lizards for them to choose from. All packed away with their tags encased in those plastic protectors. Even more, they love the tiny beanie babies that came from MacDonald's at some point. They love to line them all up and talk to them and name them and have school for them and feed them ice cream and create stories about them. Never in my life before I had children would I have thought that these stupid little stuffies would be useful. But they are and it is awesome.
This got me thinking. Beanie baby collectors are dying every single day. Seriously, they are. And what will happen to all of the mint condition friends? Someone totally needs to start a charity where they go and pick up beanie baby collections from grieving relatives and give the little guys to kids all around the world who need toys. Beanie baby collectors need to start adding these things to their wills or do something good for the world and start giving them away to less fortunate children right now!
If only I had time for another project.
And what about the Boyd's Bears? Those bears are far too nice for all the old ladies keeping them on shelves. I wanna be the Robin Hood of teddies and steal from them from the old and give them to the young.
Comments
My kids get free beanie babies from their grandma too! And McD's toys still in the bags and cereal toys 'collected' for years. I applaud your thinking of the beanie baby charity, I have a relative (my age) that has four super huge plastic bins filled with those little guys that she has moved to three cities already. That is a lot of happy kids.
Posted by: Carrie G | August 19, 2008 12:26 PM
For some strange reason, my friend and I were totally obsessed with Beanie Babies (embarrassing!!) in like 1998 or so. I think it was more about going in pursuit of something on our lunch break that made it fun. What a waste!
Anyway, about a year into it, we were like 'oh crap, what the hell have we done?' and decided that we wanted to take all of the beanie babies to a children's hospital and give them out to the patients there.
We tried to arrange this - and also, we were bringing my friend's little sister so she could get in on the giving spirit ride and not one single children's hospital would let us deliver them ourselves. They would take them and distribute them for us, but we couldn't be there. So we declined - we spent all this money, after all, so we wanted to at least see any small iota of joy the dumb things would have brought to their new owners.
We ended up going to a nursing home to deliver fresh fruit and beanie babies to the old folks. It didn't exactly go like we'd hoped, but I'm still glad we did it. I know it brought MUCH joy to a good number of the residents, so it made it worthwhile.
I have kept the creepy beanie babies - like the bats, the spiders, the ghosts and skeletons, but not much else. My mom kept the bears we had.
I wish I could have gone back in time to tell my younger self to do something smarter with that money, but then again, if I could go back in time, I'd probably do something cooler than that.
Posted by: Kellee | August 19, 2008 9:16 PM
i have a useless collection of boyd's bears in my attic that i had when i was younger. if i ever dig them out, i'd be happy to send them to your girls.
Posted by: lauren etling | August 19, 2008 11:21 PM