Turns out, though, that Webkinz are just as popular with the boys. During a recent session of Trotta's computer club, 9-year-old John Rosher played in Webkinz World with his frog, Toado.

John wanted a Webkinz, "because everybody had them."

He showed off nine rooms in Toado's house, including the game room he furnished with an air hockey table.

"Dude, where'd you get that?" a boy sitting nearby asked, pointing to a tropical plant shooting sparks in one of Toado's rooms.

John had just won $175 worth of Kinz cash by making hamburgers, a job that boosted his Webkinz spending account to $1,603.

"You have $1,000, John?" 9-year-old Izzy Laskero asked from two computers down. "I have $8,000!"

"I don't know how you guys get all this money," Trotta said, overhearing the exchange. "Don't you have to feed your pets?"

Yes, they do. In Webkinz World, children have to set spending priorities. New shoes or food for the pet?

A virtual Webkinz gets sick when ignored. It's Health/Happiness/Hunger meter plummets.

When store owner Sheri Bell's daughter got her first Webkinz before Halloween last year, she stuffed it with her favorite foods _ virtual cookies, cakes, hamburgers.

"But one day she signed on and his face was blue with a thermometer in his mouth, and she had to take him to the clinic," Bell said.

Parents applaud life lessons like that delivered in a virtual world they say is kid-friendly and kid-safe.

"I feel like they're learning a lot of tools," Goldenberg said. "Right now, it feels like a safe thing for them to be doing."

Even, she said, when her daughters send e-mails to their friends in Webkinz World. Chat-room exchanges are limited to pre-composed messages, benign as "I hope your day is completely cool!" Messages can be sent only between friends who know each other's secret user names.

Trotta, the teacher, likes that games on the site with names like Wheel of Wow and Quizzy's Question Corner are non violent.

Still, some parents are more excited than others. Josh Reid, the father of three grade-school girls, works at Chic A' Dees Trophy in Overland Park, Kan., where names are put on a waiting list for the next Webkinz shipment.

Reid hasn't bought one for his daughters. "We try to keep an eye on what they take in their brains," he said.

"It's like anything else. It's something a parent can purchase and sit their down in front of the computer for a couple of hours and not worry about them. It'd be something neat for a parent to share with their kids. But I don't think that's happening."

Oh, but it does. And some parents get so hooked on the Webkinz games through their kids that they log on when the kids aren't around.

"I didn't realize how much I have been playing the games on there until today, when their Web site has been down all day!" one cyberspace blogger confessed.

Adults, too, are fueling a hot secondary market for Webkinz. Adults who beat the kids to the stores are selling the animals on eBay, sometimes for twice their retail value. Late last week the online auction site listed more than 10,000 Webkinz items for sale.

One man recently bought $366 worth of Webkinz at Ferrell's Hallmark in Lenexa. That's why that store's manager and others are considering purchase limits.

"We don't want adults buying them to sell them on eBay when there are so many kids saving up their allowances," Apricot Lane owner Bell said.

And oh, what a child won't do for a Webkinz.

One little boy in Belknap's Hallmark store pulled a $20 bill out of his pocket to buy one.

"You must have worked hard to earn that,'" she told him.

Yes, the boy said.

I had to fold my mother's underwear.