Welcome to the Beanie Zone!

The first kind of beanie I ever got!

Fun to swing around by the tail.

I had this beanie as a kid!

If you pull the joey out of the pouch you discover it's just a severed head attached by a string.

One time as a small child I put my chicken beanie in a toy cookpot, much to the amusement of my parents. They always bring it up if I talk about beanies.

I have so many of these now, but I'm not sure I ever had one as a kid. I'm pretty sure I had a teeny beanie crab, but a full-sized beanie? No idea.

Regardless, I love these things. Such a good crab design. I'm happy every time I look at them.

One of my favorites as a kid by virtue of being one of the first I ever got. Pictured is the lion I had as a child, which I know for certain because most of his mane has been cut off. I was going through a scissors phase.

One of the few "fantasy" style beanies I had as a kid. He and the brown lion were friends.

Has elastic along the inside of it's coils, so it stays coiled up! You can wrap it around your arm or around another beanie, or you can bounce it like a slinky. Sometimes I wished that I could make it lay flat so it could slither, but it was a still a great toy.

My snake no longer has a forked tongue. Another victim of my scissors phase.

My mom took me to the zoo a lot as a kid, and for a little while they had beanie babies in the gift shop. As far as I know this is the only beanie I ever got at the zoo.

Possibly based on a Kermode Bear.

The store I got her at was having a sale, so I was able to pick out three (3!!) entire beanie babies to buy. I settled on this bear and two other brown bears (see below). My mom tried to convince me to pick out three unique beanies instead, but it was too late. I had already bonded with and thought up stories for these ones.

Do I regret not picking out three unique beanies? No

If "Almond" is a kermode bear, I like to think that these guys are a brown phenotype of black bear so that they are all the same species.

I'm pretty sure I had this one as a kid.

I like how the cloth on this beanie is textured to look like scaly armor. It's all bumpy.

I definitely had one of these as a kid. I'm pretty sure I thought it was a komodo dragon, but looking at the tag poem I guess it's just supposed to be a generic species of monitor lizard.

The top of the forked tongue is velvety!

I definitely did not have this one as a kid, but I am absolutely delighted that it exists.

This one isn't an animal, but I loved it as a kid anyway.

I got this from a crane machine game, but not because I won it. I did try, but failed miserably. My memory is fuzzy because I was so young, but I think what happened is that someone who worked at... wherever I was took pity on me and retrieved the ghost from the machine for me.

Whoever that was, thank you very much. I was probably too shy to say anything but it absolutely made my day.

I don't remember playing with this one much, but I do know that one was given to me at a young age by my grandmother. She had to talk me out of naming it "Horny".

I would have loved to have this as a kid. The teeny beanie ostrich was one of my favorites.

Excellent beanie, captures the goofiness of a real ostrich.

Has a little strip of seaweed sewn onto its paws! Delightful.

Absolutely incredible. I love this one. I'm just so delighted that a scorpion beanie baby exists, and that it looks so much like a real scorpion.

There's elastic sewn into the stinger so that it curls.

Looks like it could be a yellow garden spider.

Cute little spider. It's been a fun surprise discovering these bug beanie babies. I really didn't expect there to be any!

This beanie is enormous. The picture does not properly portray how massive this beanie is.

Love this huge fish

About the size and shape of a real duckling.

This one is great, and I would have loved it as a kid. It's apparently supposed to be a squid, but to me it looks much more like a giant pacific octopus than any squid, and starting in the 3rd grade I was obsessed with octopuses.

I drew octopuses all the time, and was very particular about making sure they had accurate body shapes and the correct number of arms. This beanie not only has eight limbs, but it has eyes that stick out, siphons on either side, and a large heavy head filled with beans. Octopuses keep all their organs in their head, so I would have appreciated this detail.

Good basic lamb beanie. You can tell it's older since it just has the same generic body plan that a lot of the early beanies had.

Even still, it has a nice wooley fur texture to give it some character.

Confusingly named, and not to be confused with the similar "Fleecia" apparently released 10 years later.

A very good frog.

One of the few beanies that I can actually remember having a name for. This one was named "Snowball".

This kitten is sewn in such a way that it is always sprawled on its side, which I normally wouldn't have liked. Something about this one, though... it was too... adorable. I couldn't hate it. You can't move it out of its lying down position, but you can make it curl up tighter, put its tail over its tiny nose, hold it cupped between your two palms and imagine it's a real tiny kitten asleep in your hands...

Even now, holding this beanie makes me feel... soft

This beanie apparently comes in four different versions. I believe I have coarse maned versions, both with and without the "star" on the forehead.

Cool older style horse beanie. Very different from Oats (see below)

The difference between Derby and Oats really shows off how beanie baby designs evolved over the course of five years.

I do really like this era of beanie babies, where their designs have gotten more complex and realistic, but they haven't yet started to make beanies with huge sparkly eyes.

I like mane on this beanie

This beanie rules, I love it. A great bat. Probably about the size and shape of a real bat, actually, since so many bat species are so small.

There are little velcro strips on the ends of the wings so you can stick them together. That would have been a lot of fun as a kid.

This is a near-perfect jellyfish design, marred only by the fact that it has eyes. If you turn it around and pretend the eyes aren't there it becomes perfect.

I would have loved this beanie as a kid. It could have been a long-lost relative to Stripeys!

Seems to be a fantasy subspecies of cold-weather tiger. Real white tigers are of course just regular tigers with leucism.

I had a teeny beanie white tiger as a kid, so I would have also loved this beanie. The teeny white tiger had a similar relationship to Stripeys as Cub did to Little Bear in the Little Bear Movie.

These monkeys have elastic sewn into the tips of their tails so that they always curl.

Extremely good beanie. Love this one. The beak is almost as long as the body.

Big goofy cartoony dragon. The wings feel like they're made out of the same crinkly plastic material that Mystic the Unicorn's horn is.

Another dragon, very similar to Magic, but you can definitely tell that it was made 3 years later. I like the additional details added. It now has a slightly open mouth with a tongue, spikes along its back, and little claws sewn on its feet.

I think I may have had this one as a kid... I don't really remember but it seems very familiar...

If I did have it as a kid, I'm very surprised I didn't cut off the little ribbon around its neck.

Delightful beanie. It's supposed to be a mouse, and I suppose it does look like one, but since it is so much larger than an actual mouse I can't help but think of it as a rat. It's about the size and shape of a real rat. Regardless of what specific rodent it is, I love it.

A decent beanie. The coloring is fine but to me it fails to capture the roundness of a real panda. It has the same body shape as Almond and Pecan, who are equally slim, but I could accept that for them since brown bears hibernate and wake up relatively skinny.

Pandas, however, do NOT hibernate, and despite their diet being almost exclusively plants they are still able to store large amounts of fat thanks to specialized gut flora. Ideally, a panda will always be fat. Unfortunately, this beanie is not. It is, however, very soft.

Pretty good seahorse! It is very seahorse shaped, and has a pleasing iridescent color. I think I would like it more if it was less... smooth. Real seahorses are incredibly boney, bumpy fish.