"What is it?" Pauly asked Pippa.
Pippa looked thoughtfully at the pink creature sitting on the bed. "All I know is it’s called Floyd," she replied. "It’s sort of a stuffed toy."
"Like Bye-bye?" Pauly suggested, thinking of the bear at his house, the one that used to belong to Jeffy's mother and was now Jeffy's.
"I think so," Pippa said, "and like my bear."
"Only this Floyd thing doesn’t look like a bear," she said.
"It sort of looks like a bird," Pauly said, "but it has such a long neck. I’ve never seen a bird with such a long neck."
"Swans have long necks," Pippa told him.
"Geese, too," she added.
Pauly had never seen a swan, but he had seen geese, when Jeffy took him along on the family picnic down at the river.
When he thought about it, he remembered seeing geese eating the grass next to the parking lot when Jeffy's family went shopping. Their necks were long, but not quite as long as a swan's neck.
"Geese don’t have such long legs," Pauly pointed out. "Do swans have long legs?"
Pippa thought about the swans she had seen. Mostly they were swimming in the water, so you couldn’t tell how long their legs were. She couldn’t remember if they had long legs, but she didn’t think so. If she tried to imagine a swan walking on land, she decided their legs were a lot like legs on a goose.
"It isn’t very realistic," she said. "I never saw a pink bird before. Maybe it’s a made-up creature." Pippa knew that sometimes human people liked to make up creatures that weren’t real, and sometimes they used their ideas to make toys. Toys don’t have to be completely real, because you are supposed to use your imagination.
"Floyd is a flamingo (fla-MING-goh)," said a voice from the floor.
The two dolls scooted over to the edge of the bed and looked over.
Mandy had come into the room and heard the two smaller dolls talking. "He isn’t a real flamingo, of course, but that’s what he’s supposed to look like."
Mandy climbed up onto the bed, so they could carry on a regular conversation. She knew that Pippa and Pauly would want to know more. They always wanted to know more about things that were new to them, and Mandy reads a lot, so she knows things.
"So a flamingo is a real thing," Pauly said. "Is it a bird? It looks sort of like a bird."
"Yes," Mandy said, picking up the phone that was lying on the table next to the bed. "Flamingos are birds. Real flamingos can actually fly, although Floyd's wings don’t look as if they could support his weight. I’ll show you what real flamingos look like."
"Do real flamingos have such long legs?" Pauly asked while Mandy was looking for a good photo of a real flamingo.
"Yes," Mandy replied. "They wade in the water. The way they eat is by dipping their heads down in the water and scooping up the mud from the bottom. They turn their heads upside-down and strain their food out of the mud and water."
"What color are real flamingos?" Pippa asked then.
When Mandy found a good photo on the phone, she showed it to them. "They really are pink," she said, although they could see for themselves.
"Birds can be lots of different colors," she told them. "Usually the colors depend on the kind of bird. Some are really bright, like parrots and macaws."
"Their feathers grow those colors, but flamingos are different," Mandy explained.
"Flamingos' feathers get their color from what the flamingos eat," Mandy explained. "They eat small water creatures, like shrimp, and algae (AL-jee), which is almost like a plant, but lives in water. Their food has the same kind of stuff that makes carrots orange. That makes their feathers pink."
"So where did Floyd come from?" Pippa asked. "The toy, I mean. Why is he on the bed?"
"I suspect Floyd is on the bed because The Writer thought he would look good there," Mandy suggested. "A friend used to give The Writer flamingo gifts as a joke," Mandy explained, "because The Writer said pink was her least-favorite color. This pillow, for example," she said, turning the pillow around so they could see the other side, where there was a picture of a flamingo. This was a present from her friend."
"One time the friend gave her some napkins with flamingos on them. Another time she gave her a plastic lawn ornament that looked like a flamingo," Mandy said.
Just then, Emil appeared in the doorway. "Floyd called me and asked me to come," he told them.
The dolls looked at Floyd.
Floyd looked back.
"He says," Emil told them, after he had climbed up onto the bed where he could talk with them better, "he says that it isn’t polite to talk about someone as if they weren’t there."
Emil is the only doll who can hear Floyd talk. The other dolls thought about what Emil had told them. They suddenly realized that Floyd's feelings might be hurt, so they apologized to him.
To make it up to him, Pippa and Pauly offered to read him a story. They picked out a book about airplanes, because they thought he would like to hear about flying.
After Pauly went home, Pippa found her bear and gave him a hug. She decided she needed to pay more attention to her friends who couldn't talk to her.
Mandy: Götz Happy Kidz Katie 2015
Emil: Götz Happy Kidz Emilia
"The Doll's Storybook" is not affiliated with Gotz Dolls USA Inc. or Götz Puppenmanufaktur International GmbH.
Watch for the next story each Friday afternoon at 1:00 PM Pacific Time.
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