Say you have a friend who's just had a baby.

What's more natural than to buy that baby a teddy?

Or a giraffe? A lion? A mouse? A bunny? A tiger? A non-specific mammilian representative of some species rendered in huggable, hypo-allergenic cloth?

It's a wonderful idea. It's a beautiful and tender idea.

All your friends have had the same idea, as well as your relatives.

We have seven children; and each of the children does, indeed, have a special stuffed animal he or she adores. In fact, when Blueberry, a stuffed bear with a porcelain face -- beloved by our daughter Mia at age 7 just as at 3 -- met her doom at the hands of Mia's well-meaning little brother (who's sort of a living teddy bear, lumbering through life, with hands half the size of my own at age two), we went into panic mode. Most of Bluberry was still intact. Her face, however, had met its match on the washroom floor and was more or less gone, beyond repair.

The sorrow caused occasioned a late-night cross-country phone call.

Fortunately, Blueberry met her demise while I was in Las Vegas; and as fate would have it, that was whence she had come.

A 10 p.m. trip to the Bellagio Hotel turned up a smaller and floppier cousin. After a proper funeral for the deceased, "Strawberry" took the place of honor on Mia's pillow.

However. there are also adorable stuffed moose, in every guise including bunny ears and pumpkin costumes on Mia's bed. There's a whole zoo of carnival animals won by an over-zealous dad. On her sister's bed across the room, there are dogs, ducks and dragons.

And yet, when our youngest was born, we coudln't find enough undershirts.

The problem with plush is that once it's in a child's hands, it's impossible to dislodge. Pleas on behalf of children who have no stuffed animals are greeted with stony silence. The attempt to make it to the garage with an arc filled with lions and labrador retrievers is accompanied by wails of despair: Each of those creatures has suddenly become the cherished one.

Stores (no fools, they!) sell hammocks to install in the corners of the room, so that every single stuffed animal can go into that storage unit, where the group can happily commune and breed dust mites of every variety. The hammock is where stuffed deer or antelope stay: One who goes into the hammock never comes out again, except to be used as an auxiliary bowling pin in a pinch.

I'm not saying that some of those stuffed animals aren't beloved. When he got his own apartment, we were treated to the sight of our 200-pound son tossing the contents of the upstairs closet in search of his bear, Puffy -- and absolutely unrepentant about the fact that he was going nowhere without his one-eyed suede-nosed companion, who'd sat on his bed for nineteen years.

But not every animal can be a Puffy; and it's a torment to parents to have to gift a stuffed animal that's completely adorable to someone else -- partly out of longing for its sweetness, partly out of fear that the family member will visit and do a room-to-room inspection, expecting to find that particular stuffed animal in a place of honor.

If you read this, and you are a relative of mine, rest assured that the stuffed animal YOU gave to one of our children is indeed prized; it's the other 750 we don't know what to do with.

But next time a friend has a baby, remember this little blog; and write out a $10 check for the college fund.