Nancy's Beanie Babies Collection Comes out of Hiding. Some surprises too!

February 10, 2018

#232

Gentle reader,

Like many people in the last Millennium, my wife got caught up in the Beanie Babies craze. A guy I worked with had a bunch of them, knew what they were "worth" and I bought a few from him for her. I will not attempt to name any of them. Fans will know them anyway on sight.

Above are all 160 of them. They've been carefully stored in the attic, dust free, since around 2000.  I took multiple shots (below) walking from the front to the rear to give you a closer look.

I might have used Photoshop to merge these three photos into one long one panorama picture, but was not sure how well it would work in this blog format.
Last night, we set them up in family groups for a photo shoot. The results are below:

Da Bears! If you recognize that quote, you're showing your age. I like the way the koala seems to be trying to see around the preying one. We're not sure where the Mexican one came from. 

Doggies! We were once cat people, then one puppy came to live with us, then another, then another, now we have four: 2 Dachshunds and two Pražský krysařík which is Czech for "Prague Ratter". We thought they were really small Min-Pins, then recently saw a video about the smallest dog breeds and realized that's what they are. We still have two cats and one outside cat. All get along fine. ANYWAY, above are the dog ones. One of the dogs in the front row has "Hoppity" on it's tush tag. So that's an error collectors love to find.

Cats, large & small, or wild and domestic, if you prefer. Interestingly, the one on the top right, (below) is a Chimera cat in real life. Two of our daughters have one. What happens to create one, is two fertilized eggs merge in the cat's womb. The two DNAs fight it out. What you end up with is a cat with two separate colors on it's face, split right down the middle. Often they have the same thing on their belly: A straight line dividing the two designs/colors of their pelts.

Bunnies, sitting and standing(?). 

 These owls are graduation ones. The newest, 2005, is quite fancy.

Fowl and not. Birds, that is. Ducks, geese, etc. and chickens above, smaller birds, raptors and an ostrich below. Oops! The turkey belongs in the group above. Oh, well.

 Hummingbird is a more recent purchase than the rest.

Flying things that are not birds. Or might fly if they existed.

Ocean dwelling animals above and mammals below. Not sure what the white one is.

Creepy crawlers above and reptiles below. 

Barnyard animals above and forest dwellers below.

 OK, so sloths are not primates, but they are furry and live in trees, so he photo bombed.

 Large mammals above. Plus one McDonald's version of the elephant.

 An odd lot above. All mammals. Two of them marsupials.

 Holiday grouping above. My wife said the turkey and bunnies could be in that group too.

Lastly, two unicorns. The pink one is the other more recent one.   

So here's what happened. She decided to pick out some keepers and let her daughter and grandkids pick some too. Daughter started looking them up and found that a number of them are "rare and valuable". Since we have had them since new and they sat in the attic most of their lives, we took delight in her taking as many as she wants to do with what she wants. Consider it her inheritance, early. Like there would ever be anything to inherit from us! I asked Nancy if she wanted to put any of hers on eBay, she declined. Frankly, it has been my experience after 20 years on eBay, it's better to keep some things as the money realized by passing them on to others is gone quickly buying other things for my hobbies. 

Thanks for looking,

Scott

February 10, 2018