Okay, I admit it. I am simply DYING to own the Sweet Sasha and Marvelous Malia dolls from Ty. Not because I really want little likenesses of the President's kids in my bedroom (though Ty claims they have nothing to do with the Obama girls - right), but because I think this is downright creepy.

So my search for the dollies started with the Ty website, of course. This stupid thing is virtually impossible to navigate. Their web designer must be having an affair with the guy who invented Flash animation because it's pretty much the only way to get anywhere, and it doesn't seem to be working correctly. There is, however, a little survey on the main page that asks visitors what they would put on a hypothetical fort: lots of flags, a moat, a dragon, or underground tunnels. When I clicked my choice, "underground tunnels," there was this terrible slurping-splatting noise and I then saw that I was in line with 67% of visitors to Ty's website. I always was a sheep.



So, back to Sweet Sasha and Marvelous Malia. I tried first to search for Sweet Sasha. I tried searching in the store, and got no matches for the name Sasha. Okay then. I then moved to the search box in the upper right hand corner. It found Sasha, but when I clicked her, it just showed a big picture of the doll, staring at me with its terrifying, vacant eyes. No option to buy, no opportunity for a loving beanie baby parent like me to take the little darling home with me. Why must they torture me so?!

I should have known from the start that this was going to become another Humphrey the Camel debacle. Back in the late 90's, my beanie-baby-crazed friends all wanted Humphrey the Camel, claiming he was worth $3,000. (Now he's apparently not worth that much.) I moved on to Amazon.com, where the dolls are selling, at this moment, for $92.99. What the hell! Not $3K, but still way more than I'm willing to pay for something that I don't even really want and certainly can't rationally justify.

Next, of course, is eBay. The cheapest buy-it-now price i can find is $18.99 (plus $4.95 shipping and handling - nope, that breaks my bank), and some sets of the dolls have 16+ bids.

I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. All this nonense with $93 stuffed plush dolls could easily be avoided if Ty's website wasn't so freakin stupid and offered an easy way to buy the dolls for $9.99 or however much they'd be in a toy store display. What's with all the hysteria? Is Ty going out of its way to cause this bottleneck? At this point I'm inclined to say yes. I never did understand the whole Beanie Baby craze. When I was 13 and was in a skiing accident that left me with a broken face and an 8-inch gash in my head, my friend's mom took her own personal Princess Diana bear and gave it to me as a get-well present. I know I should have been honored, but I just... didn't care.

So for today I'll go without my Sweet Sasha and Marvelous Malia dolls. I won't add to the disgusting media hysteria over the President's pre-teen daughters. Even the Washington Post has joined in on the game; in an article discussing the Obamas' dislike of the dolls, the writer slips in that, in Inauguration day, "Malia wore a blue coat with a blue bow, and Sasha wore a guava pink coat with a tangerine scarf." Just in case you wanted to go to J. Crew and get thesame outfits in just the right colors. Remember, guava-pink and tangerine.

Maybe some other day, my darling little plushies.