So my wife and I gave in to the latest craze for grade school kids: we bought our daughters some Webkinz stuffed animals, which you can take online into their own virtual world. Here you can interact with other webkinz, dress & feed them, have them make money at a job, take them bowling, that sort of thing.

Thing is, the wife and I each got our own webkinz as something we could do as a family, and now we find it necessary to tend to it daily: Spin the Wheel of Wow, go the Wishing Well, see that dumbass dog who owns the gem mine.

Oh, I can quit anytime I want. I'm not addicted. Just wondered if any other parents are living in Webkinz world as we are.

I've never even heard of them

I don't have gradeschool kids anymore so that may be why

I'm not living in the Webkinz world but my daughter is there.

She has 28 and counting. Today is the last day of school so after school she will get two more. The Limited Too has buy one get one free.

oh man, that's one thing that blows me away. These dolls cost around $10-13 apiece, and my daughters' friends have like 30 or 50 or 75 of them! Holy SHIT, that is a lot of freaking money for these things!

Worse yet, the yearlong registration ends in 365 days and the Ganz company expects people to fork over another $10 to re-register for the next year. What a marketing coup.

Our daughters have exactly ONE, but we're thinking of sucking it up and getting them another one each. We're old school that way.