My older daughter has been begging me for a Baby Alive doll for over a year.  For those of you without kids, Baby Alive is an especially coveted doll because she eats & drinks and then says “uh oh I made a stinkie” – and then the lucky owner gets to change her soiled diaper.  For a while my husband & I were able to stave off our daughter’s begging with the response that if she wanted to play mommy so badly we could easily have another baby and she could start changing some real diapers.  But for some reason this idea never caught on.

So at some point last year I went to Toys R Us to check out Baby Alive and see what was what.  A baby doll didn’t seem objectionable – unlike some of those other “little girl dolls” which in reality look like a bunch of libidinous ho-bags.  I’m thinking okay – a baby doll.  Not bad.  And I wasn’t mistaken, Baby Alive is indeed a baby doll – no objection there – but (last year anyway) she cost over $50(!!!) and was ugly as sin.  So.  My older daughter’s birthday rolls around and she’s wondering why No Baby Alive.  I’m frank with her – I know she’ll understand.  I tell her: Well, honey, I went to the store with every intention of buying you Baby Alive, but when I got there I found out it cost a fortune and was hideously ugly.  The brown Baby Alive was actually very cute, but she was still too expensive.

And surprisingly, she did understand, and dropped the Baby Alive beg-a-thon until just recently.  In this interim she had actually seen Baby Alive up close and personal in several stores and agreed wholeheartedly that White Baby Alive is indeed scarily bizarre looking, with its freakish frying pan eyes 4 sizes too big for its head.  But we both agreed that Brown Baby Alive is really quite cute.  So, this Christmas, you can of course guess what was top o’ the list for my older daughter.  Numero Uno: BROWN BABY ALIVE.

So, I go back to Toys R Us a month ago, and what do I find??  Every single one of the very cute Brown Baby Alive dolls are G-O-N-E.  And, of course, not surprisingly they are overstocked on the waaaay ugly White Baby Alive.  What to do?  Well, of course, as any good mother would do, I bought the ugly one before they sold out of that one too, took it home and wrapped it up.

So this morning when my older daughter unwrapped White Baby Alive (after saving her for the very last present because she had of course guessed that this was her longed for “big gift”), what does she say:

“BABY ALIVE!!!!

Oh man, it’s the creepy one…”