"You're home!" Billy exclaimed as he and Emil came into the workroom to find Jolena already almost finished unpacking. They climbed up on the big chair. They wanted to find out all about her trip.
"Hi, boys!" Jolena replied. "I got home about 15 minutes ago."
"I didn't hear the car," Emil said with concern.
"Don't worry, Emil," Billy told him, "I didn't hear it either. I'm sure your special glasses are still working."
"The Uber driver who brought me has an electric car," Jolena explained. "It hardly makes any sound at all."
"How was the snow in Australia?" Emil asked. He knows that Jolena likes to talk about the snow conditions when she returns from her yearly trip to the Southern Hemisphere, where it is winter now.
"It was great!" Jolena said. "We had 8" of snow right after we got there. Of course, they can make snow because it's cold enough, but real snow from the sky is lovely!"
Jolena finished putting her clothes away. Then the boys held open to the lid to the big bin, so she could put her ski equipment away. After that was done, the three dolls went to sit on the day bed. Jolena knew the boys wanted to hear all about her trip. She had photos on her phone to show them.
"I got to improve some of my tricks," Jolena said, "and Elizabeth was there, so we got to spend some time together." She was always happy to get to see her friend in person. Usually they just saw each other on the computer or tablet, using FaceTime, but they got to be together whenever the Doll Ski Team went somewhere together.
Jolena knew that the boys only enjoyed listening to her talk about snow and skiing for so long before they politely found an excuse to go and do something else. This trip, though, included some adventures she knew the boys would enjoy. She stopped talking about skiing and her friends on the Doll Ski Team for a few seconds to think about the other things she did on her trip.
"After our week of ski practice," Jolena began, "we got into a car and rode about five hours to Sydney. That's a big city in Australia," she explained.
The boys knew that Sydney was in Australia. They had learned about Australia in school. "That's where the famous opera house is, I think," Emil said. He loved listening to music, ever since he got his special glasses that allow him to see and hear things he couldn't see and hear before.
"Yes," Jolena agreed. "We got to see it. It's very unusual. It doesn't look like a regular building at all. It looks as if you could just fold it up, but it's huge, so I don't know why you would." She showed them the photo she took with her phone.
"What did you see that was the most fun?" asked Billy, who wanted to get to the good part, now that Jolena had hinted that there was one.
Jolena didn't have to think before she answered. "We went to the zoo!"
"Zoos are fun," Emil said.
"The zoo in Portland is great," Billy added.
"But this zoo is different," Jolena pointed out, flipping through photos to find the ones she took at the zoo. "This zoo has animals that are special to Australia. They are never found anywhere else in the world except in zoos. They live in different parts of Australia, but Sydney has a zoo where you can see all of Australia's special animals in one place."
"Did you see a kangaroo?" Billy asked. He knew Australia was where kangaroos came from.
"Yes," Jolena affirmed, as she found the photos she was looking for. The kangaroo was her first photo from the zoo. "This zoo had several of them. A one of them had a baby in her pouch big enough to poke its head out and look around." Jolena showed the boys the photo she had taken of the mother kangaroo and her baby.
"The baby is called a joey," she told them.
"They also have wallabies at that zoo," Jolena said, showing them another photo from her phone. "They are a lot like kangaroos, only smaller all over, and their hind legs are not as big compared with their bodies as a kangaroo's hind legs."
"I know kangaroos are only found in Australia," Billy said, "unless they're in a zoo, but are other marsupials found anywhere else?"
"I don't know about anywhere else in the world," Jolena replied, "but maybe we can look it up and find out. I do know that Australia has other marsupials besides the kangaroo and the wallaby."
"Did you see those other marsupials at the zoo?" Emil wanted to know.
"Yes," Jolena replied. "They have several other kinds there. The wombat is one." She showed them the picture she took of one of the wombats at the zoo.
"It looks very big," Billy said, "or is that plant just very small."
Billy understands how something can look big in a photo when it isn't, because he takes photos with his camera. Besides, he's a doll, and he knows he can look like a real boy next to something made for him, like one of the bicycles.
"The adults, the grown-up ones," Jolena said, "are very big, but the keeper picked one up to show us.
The boys looked at the picture on Jolena's phone.
"Wow!" Emil exclaimed. "That wombat is a lot bigger than we are!"
All three dolls agreed. The keeper was not a doll. She was a real human grownup, which they knew, because they had seen a few, and they are always bigger than dolls like Jolena and the boys.
"Another marsupial they have is the Tasmanian devil," Jolena said, showing them the photo. "This animal originated on Tasmania, an island off the coast of the Australian mainland."
"It's sort of cute," Billy said, thinking about what it must have been like for Jolena to be able to take the photo.
"It looks cute," Jolena said, "but they can be ferocious. The keepers have to train them to allow them to be touched, so they can look after their health. I guess this one was about half the size of the wombat. It would be much easier to pick up, but the keepers don't do that."
"Weren't you afraid," Emil asked, "to get so close?"
"I used the zoom on the phone camera," she said. "They didn't let us get that close, but the zoom lets you take photos that are much closer, sort of like a telescope lets you see closer."
"Now," Jolena continued, if you want cute, I think the koala (koh-AH-luh) is the cutest."
"It looks like a teddy bear," Billy said. "How big is it?"
"It's much smaller than the wombat," Jolena replied. "It's closer to the size of the Tasmanian devil. The keepers can pick them up, though. They don't bite."
"Those are all the marsupials we saw," Jolena said, "but I think the most interesting creature we saw was the platypus!"
"It looks," Emil pointed out, "like it couldn't decide whether to be a duck or a beaver."
Jolena looked at the picture on her phone. She had to agree, it did look like that. "Well," she told them, "it has a bill like a duck and it lays eggs like a duck, but it has hair, like other mammals, instead of feathers.
"It's going for a swim," Billy said. "Do they live in the water?"
"They live near the water," Jolena said, "and they spend most of the time they're awake in the water. They eat worms and insects and small creatures like shrimp that only live in the water. They sleep in a kind of hole they make, like a little cave, near the water."
"Let's look up marsupials now and see if there are any that don't live in Australia," Jolena suggested, since she was finished with the zoo photos. She typed in "marsupial" on her phone, and this is what the dolls found out: There are many different kinds of marsupials in the Western Hemisphere, mostly in South America.
"The only marsupial in North America, where we live," Jolena said, "is the opossum." She tapped the photo, so it would fill the screen. She showed it to the boys. "It says people sometimes shorten the name to just possum."
"It looks like a rat," Emil said, and Billy and Jolena nodded in agreement.
"It does look like a rat," Jolena agreed, "but it says here that it isn't related to rats, mice or other rodents. It's a marsupial, like the kangaroo."
"What looks like a rat?" asked a small voice from the doorway. It was Pippa. "I want to see!"
Pippa came and climbed up next to Jolena, so she could look. Of course, Jolena had to show her all the photos. Pippa wanted to see the kangaroo and her joey, the wallaby, the wombat, the Tasmanian devil, the koala and especially the platypus, and then the thing that looked like a rat but was not a rat at all but related to the kangaroo: the opossum.
"So are you planning to learn to speak Australian now," Pippa asked when they were done looking at Jolena's photos and Jolena turned off her phone, "the way you've been learning Spanish for your trips to Argentina and...where was the other place?"
"Chile." Jolena said with a laugh, "and in Australia, they speak English, although it does sound a little different from the way dolls talk here. It's easy to understand when you get used to what's different. "I'm going to stick with learning Spanish for now," she added. "It's getting easier, and it's fun."
"Because it's different!" Pippa proclaimed. She had learned that things that are different can be fun.
Jolena: Götz Happy Kidz Lena in Aspen
Billy: Götz Happy Kidz Lily at London
Emil: Götz Happy Kidz Emilia
"The Doll's Storybook" is not affiliated with Gotz Dolls USA Inc. or Götz Puppenmanufaktur International GmbH.
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Copyright © 2022 by Peggy Stuart
