Peggy Stuart's Blog

Veronika looked up from the book she was reading in bed to see Billy at the door to the room where she sleeps.
"Veronika, may I come in?" Billy asked.



"Sure, Billy," Veronika replied, "you can come in, but I thought you were asleep."



"I was asleep," Billy said, climbing up on the bed with Veronika. "I had a bad dream. I don't think I dare go back to sleep again."


Veronika closed her book and patted the bed to invite Billy to sit next to her.
"Do you remember your dream, Billy?" she asked.
"Yes, I do," he replied. "That's why I'm afraid to go to sleep."


"Maybe it will help you if you tell me about your dream," Veronika suggested.


"Well," Billy began, "in the dream a monster came out of the laptop and chased me around. I ran and ran, but it kept getting closer. Then I was falling. Falling doesn't usually scare me, because I know my vinyl is sturdy, but I kept falling and never hit the floor. Then I woke up. I was afraid the monster would be hiding somewhere in the bedroom."


"You know dreams aren't real, don't you Billy?" Veronika asked. "It's just something your doll brain does when you're asleep."
"This sure seemed real," he said. "I remember it as if it really happened."
"Well," said Veronika, "dolls are made to be like people, so our brains work the same way. I read that people who study how people's brains work have been trying for a long time to understand dreams. They think there is a purpose to them, like if you are learning lots of new things during the day, you will dream a lot more at night. Maybe it's the brain's way to organize and store what it has taken in all day."



Billy thought about that. "I guess I am learning a lot now," he said. "Before I came out of my box, I dreamed, but I don't remember much of what I dreamed about, just that it was sometimes interesting and never scary."


"Dolls sleep most of the time that they are in their boxes, so they have lots of dreams," Veronika explained. "That dreaming is what dolls do to get ready for the lives they will lead when they come out of their boxes. It helps teach them how to be companions to the children they will belong to. A companion is like a friend who is always there with you, who keeps you company. We dolls do that."
"But this dream was scary," Billy said.


"It's called a nightmare," Veronika explained. "It's normal to dream. Even dogs and cats dream. Sometimes you can see their legs move as if they are chasing something or running from something."
"I have seen Freckles and Pierre do that," Billy agreed. "Does that mean they are having scary dreams? Nightmares?"



"I don't know for sure," Veronika replied. "It probably means they are dreaming, but it could be a happy dream. The people who study dreams haven't figured out what dreams are for, only that there must be some purpose for them. If there is, it seems to be something animals need, too, so they dream."
"So that means sometimes children have nightmares?" Billy asked.
"Yes, they do," Veronika said, "and because children have nightmares, we have to understand what it's like, so we can comfort them."


"Children and dolls can have nightmares," Veronika went on, "especially after something scares them, like a scary movie. Maybe something happened that scared you, Billy." Then she remembered how Billy said that the dream monster came out of the computer. "Did something on the computer scare you?" she asked.
Billy thought for a long time. Then he seemed to have an idea. "I was playing a game on the computer and having a good time in the afternoon," he said.


"A picture of a strange person came on the screen," Billy went on. "Well, it looked almost like a person, but not quite. It was like a monster person. This thing told me I had to do what it told me to do, or it would hurt me. It was never there when I played that game before." Billy shivered as he talked about it. "It really scared me!"


Veronika considered what Billy had told her.


"I think there's a good chance that your brain was working through that fright," she suggested. "There are some bad people in the world who want to use our computers to hurt us, but they can't really hurt us if we don't tell them who we are or where we live, and they can't make you do something you don't want to do."


"I think I knew that. It sure scared me, though," Billy said, clearly relieved.
"If it happens again, come and get one of us older dolls," Veronika told him. "Maybe we can fix the computer so the bad person can't get through to your game."
Billy got up. "Thanks, Veronika," he said. "I think I can go to sleep now."
"I'm glad to help," Veronika replied. "Goodnight."
"Goodnight," Billy said.


Billy went back to the bedroom where he sleeps. He looked into the closet. There was some stuff there, but no monster.


He looked under the bed. There was some stuff there, but no monster.


He checked the whole room. There was no monster anywhere. With a sigh he climbed into bed and turned out the light. "Make me do something I don't want to do! I don't think so!" he said to himself. 


Then Billy pulled on his sleep mask and went to sleep. This time he had a happy dream. In this dream he was using the computer to make his photos better. It was fun. Billy smiled in his sleep.



Cast--
Veronika: Götz Classic Kidz Vroni
Billy: Götz Happy Kidz Lily at London

You can follow The Doll's Storybook  here .

Do you have questions or comments for us? Would you like to order an autographed copy of one of our books? You can email us at thedollsstorybook@icloud.com.

Note: No dolls were harmed during production of this blog. All dolls shown are Götz Happy Kidz, Classic Kidz or Little Kidz. If you like these stories and are willing, please make a donation of any amount to  St. Jude Children's Research Hospital  or any organization that supports pediatric cancer research and treatment. We are not affiliated with St. Jude in any way other than these donations.

“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.

Do you like our stories? Some of them are available in print:

The stories in Mariah: Stories from The Doll’s Storybook are Being Little, Besties and Distraction.

The stories in Emil: Stories from The Doll’s Storybook are Best Buds, Getting What You Want and The Boys Cook Dinner.

The stories in Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll’s Storybook are Little Green Greatcoat, The Boy Doll Who Cried Wolf and Lost in the Woods.

Our book of poems, Our Favorite Verses: Poems from The Doll’s Storybook includes Valentine's Day, Keeping Pets, Back to School, Victor the Vulture, The Week Before Christmas, Insomnia and Veronika's Vocabulary Verses.

The stories in More Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll’s Storybook are Welcoming a Stranger, The Rescue, Unmasked, Fuzzy Town––A Play and Sky Blue.

Available now from BookBaby and other booksellers: Billy: Stories from The Doll’s Storybook. The Stories in Billy: Stories from The Doll’s Storybook are Talking About Boys, Changes, Shhhhh!, Staying After and Money in a Jar.

Royalties go to an organization that provides pediatric cancer research and treatment. If you don’t get free shipping from Amazon or B&N, buy from the BookBabyBookshop, because 50% of the price goes to our designated charity. Other booksellers pay much less, because the vendor gets a cut. The Writer’s author’s page at Book Baby is here. Scroll down and click on any of the books that interest you, or ask your library to get our books for you. 

Note: This blog post was produced on the iPad and the MacBook, using the iPhone for some photos and some photo processing. No other computer was used in any stage of composition or posting, and no Windows were opened, waited for, cleaned or broken. No animals or dolls were harmed during the production of this blog post.

<a href="https://www.bloglovin.com/blog/198325... my blog with Bloglovin</a>

Copyright © 2019, 2026 by Peggy Stuart

“I’m glad you’re here,” Pippa said, as she let Pam in. “Jolena is back from skiing in New Zealand,” she told her. “She was just getting ready to show us her photos!”

“But it’s summer,” Pam pointed out. “I know you need snow to ski. We get snow in the winter.”

“But they do have snow in New Zealand,” Pippa told her. “The whole Southern Hemisphere (HEM-iss-feer) has snow right now.”

“It must be very cold in the Southern Hem-Hemisphere!” Pam struggled with the new word. “Do human people live there? I know human people don’t like the cold. It’s why they heat their houses.”

“It’s colder there right now,” Pippa told her friend as they walked down the hall. “but that’s because they have winter when we have summer. It’s complicated. Just ask Mandy to explain it.”

While Billy was setting up The Writer’s laptop so they could all look at the photos, the other dolls settled in their places, where they could see the screen. Billy made sure he could turn the laptop easily, to allow each of them to see. Before Pam arrived, he had shown Jolena how to send her photos to the cloud, so they could pull them up on the laptop. (She wondered how the photos knew which cloud to go to, but she was happy to see her pictures appear on the screen.)

“Did you get to practice your Spanish?” Pippa asked the older doll after she and Pam had climbed up into one of the big chairs.

“Only with the team from Spain,” Jolena replied. “There are lots of countries where Spanish is spoken, but most of them are in South America, where it’s winter now, too, so they can practice at home.”

“They don’t speak Spanish in New Zealand,” Jolena continued, “unless they know Spanish and someone who speaks it is visiting. I mean it’s not an official language of the country.”

“What language do they speak there?” Billy asked. “Did you have time to learn it before you went?”

Jolena laughed, “I’ve had plenty of time to learn it,” she replied. “Most human people speak English there, like here, and the dolls do, too, although it does sound a little different from how English sounds here.”

“I did find out, though,” she went on, “that New Zealand has two other official languages. One is Māori (MAH-oh-ree), or Te Reo Māori. That’s the language spoken by the human people who were already living in New Zealand before the English-speaking people came to live there. That's my first picture,” she told them.

“We went to see a music and dance performance of the Māori people while we were there,” Jolena said.

The dolls all looked at the photo. Billy turned the laptop a bit, so Pippa and Pam could see. When they had had time to look at the picture, he turned it back so Emil could see, too.

Jolena turned to Emil. “And Emil, you will like this!” she said. “New Zealand Sign Language is the third official language of the country.”

She knew he would be interested, because he was learning a sign language called Signing Exact English, so he could understand what human people who couldn’t hear, even with special glasses, were saying when they use their hands to talk. He had taught Pippa a few signs.

“I wonder how it’s different,” Emil pondered.

“I wondered that, too,” Jolena told them, “so I asked. I found out that there are lots of different kinds of sign language, just as there are many spoken languages all over the world.”

“New Zealand Sign Language,” Jolena said, “isn’t just American Sign Language or even British Sign Language with an accent (AK-sent), because an accent is the way the words sound. It borrowed from British Sign Language, but it has changed over the years.”

The dolls had to think for a bit to take it all in.

“What else did you learn about New Zealand?” Billy asked.

“Well,” Jolena began, “I learned that the country is made up of mostly of two big islands. Where’s the photo of the map, the one I took at the airport after we landed?” she asked Billy.

He found the photo of the map of New Zealand and opened it up on the screen.

“We went to the island on the bottom,” she told them. “That’s South Island. We flew into Christchurch. That’s a city on South Island.” Jolena showed them where it was on the map. She had to climb up onto the table to be able to reach the screen to point to the right place. When Billy and Emil had seen where she was pointing, she moved the laptop around so the two smaller dolls could see.

“Then we took a short flight to another place, closer to where we would be skiing,” she explained. “The name of that place is Queenstown.” She pointed to where that town was on the map. Then she turned the laptop back so Billy and Emil could see.

“From there,” Jolena went on, as she climbed back onto the big chair, “we had a bus that took us to the ski area. I took the next photo out of the bus.”

Billy turned the laptop so the smaller dolls could see.

“I took another photo from where we were staying at the ski resort,” she told them.

Billy turned the laptop around again for Pippa and Pam.

“You can tell it was getting late by then. They had lights turned on on the runs the skiers were using,” she added.

“Did you win any medals in New Zealand?” Pippa asked. 

“This was just practice,” Jolena replied. “We’re getting ready for the competitions next February, but it was great for practice. I finally did a triple cork. I was really nervous when I was ready for my turn, because I knew I was going for it,” she added. “This photo was taken by our coach. I think you can see how nervous I was!”

“What’s a triple cork?” Pam asked.

“A triple cork,” Jolena told them, “is where you go up into the air and turn over three times. I could only do two times before. (That’s what we call a double cork.) Maybe I’ll even get a medal next time we compete, if I can do it right again.”

“After I took off my skis, my teammates all cheered and clapped their hands,” Jolena told them, remembering how proud she felt. “My teammate Elizabeth took this photo while they were clapping.”

“Wow!” the other dolls all said at once.

“You must be happy about improving your tricks,” Emil suggested.

Jolena thought about it and agreed. It made her feel good that all her practice was paying off.

“It sounds like a lot of work,” Billy said.

“It was a lot of work, but it was a lot of fun, too. We went back to Queenstown on our way to come home,” Jolena continued, “and we went to a special zoo there.”

Billy brought back the map of New Zealand so they could all look at it again and remember where Queenstown was.

“We saw some animals only found in New Zealand, unless they're in a zoo,” she told them. “I took a photo of a kiwi (KEE-wee),” Jolena said, as Billy found the kiwi and the dolls saw it on the screen.

“It looks like a bird,” Pippa said.

“That’s what it is,” Jolena agreed. “The kiwi has wings, but they’re so tiny, you can’t see them, and they can’t fly. They are native (NAY-tiv) to New Zealand. That means they evolved (ee-VOLVD) there.”

“I found out that if you call someone a Kiwi, it isn’t an insult. It just means the person is from New Zealand. The kiwi sleeps in the daytime and comes out at night,” Jolena explained. “The bird, I mean, not the person. Well, maybe some human people do that, too. They say a creature is nocturnal (nok-TER-nel) when it is only active at night and sleeps during the daytime.”

“Another one of New Zealand’s special animals is also a bird,” Jolena told them. “That bird is called a kea (KEE-uh). The kea is a kind of parrot, and the only parrot in the world that lives in the mountains.”

Billy pulled up the photo of the kea.

“It’s kind of plain,” Pam pointed out. “The parrots in Maryanne’s bird book are all bright colors,” thinking of the human girl she lived with.

“The kea hides its bright colors under its wings,” Jolena told her. “It shows in the next picture.” She looked at Billy, so he would know she was ready for the next one.

Billy opened up the photo Jolena was talking about and turned the laptop so Pam and Pippa could see.

When the dolls had seen all of Jolena’s photos, Pam climbed down from the chair in the dining room. “This has been fun, but I need to talk to Mandy,” she told them. “I need to find out about this alternate universe you can go to where it can be winter in summertime and summer in wintertime.”

Just like that, she was gone.

The three larger dolls looked at each other and then at Pippa. “Alternate universe?” Jolena asked.

“The Southern Hemisphere,” Pippa replied with a sigh.

Cast--

Jolena: Götz Happy Kidz Lena in Aspen
Billy: Götz Happy Kidz Lily at London
Emil: Götz Happy Kidz EmiliaPippa: Götz Little Kidz LottaPam: Götz Little Kidz Springtime, from My Doll Best Friend
Do you want to know what makes the seasons change and how it can be winter in one place and summer in another? Read about when Mandy explained it to Billy, Charlotte and Mariah in It’s Spring!
Photo of traditional Māori man: Swain DestinationsPhoto of map of New Zealand: Honey Bee SuitePhoto of ski area: SnowpakPhoto of ski area with skiers: Coronet Peak Ski AreaPhoto of Kiwi: Reader’s Digest CanadaPhoto of Kea: A-Z AnimalsPhoto of Kea in flight: Kea Conservation Trust

You can follow The Doll's Storybook  here .

Do you have questions or comments for us? Would you like to order an autographed copy of one of our books? You can email us at thedollsstorybook@icloud.com.

Note: No dolls were harmed during production of this blog. All dolls shown are Götz Happy Kidz, Classic Kidz or Little Kidz. If you like these stories and are willing, please make a donation of any amount to  St. Jude Children's Research Hospital  or any organization that supports pediatric cancer research and treatment. We are not affiliated with St. Jude in any way other than these donations.

“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.

Do you like our stories? Some of them are available in print:

The stories in Mariah: Stories from The Doll’s Storybook are Being Little, Besties and Distraction.

The stories in Emil: Stories from The Doll’s Storybook are Best Buds, Getting What You Want and The Boys Cook Dinner.

The stories in Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll’s Storybook are Little Green Greatcoat, The Boy Doll Who Cried Wolf and Lost in the Woods.

Our book of poems, Our Favorite Verses: Poems from The Doll’s Storybook includes Valentine's Day, Keeping Pets, Back to School, Victor the Vulture, The Week Before Christmas, Insomnia and Veronika's Vocabulary Verses.

The stories in More Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll’s Storybook are Welcoming a Stranger, The Rescue, Unmasked, Fuzzy Town––A Play and Sky Blue.

Available now from BookBaby and other booksellers: Billy: Stories from The Doll’s Storybook. The Stories in Billy: Stories from The Doll’s Storybook are Talking About Boys, Changes, Shhhhh!, Staying After and Money in a Jar.

If you don’t get free shipping from Amazon or B&N, buy from the BookBabyBookshop, because 50% of the price goes to St. Jude. Other booksellers pay much less, because the vendor gets a cut. The Writer’s author’s page at Book Baby is here. Scroll down and click on any of the books that interest you. Find our books at Barbara’s Bookstore as well, or ask your library to get them for you.

Note: This blog post was produced on the iPad and the MacBook, using the iPhone for some photos and some photo processing. No other computer was used in any stage of composition or posting, and no Windows were opened, waited for, cleaned or broken. No animals or dolls were harmed during the production of this blog post.

<a href="https://www.bloglovin.com/blog/198325... my blog with Bloglovin</a>

Copyright © 2024, 2026 by Peggy Stuart

“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. It just plays a little tune when it’s moving, so pedestrians know it’s there.”

“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’s winter now.

“It was great!” Jolena said. “We had 8 inches 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 equipment and props 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, too, 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 during calls on the computer or tablet, 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 sounds like cars and music.

“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 a 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.”

Someone at the zoo had explained all this to Jolena and her friends. “Kangaroos and wallabies are marsupials (mar-SOO-pee-uls),” she told them. “Those are mammals whose babies are born before they are developed and are kept in the mother’s pouch until they are ready to move around on their own.”

“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 dolls’ bicycles.

“The adults, the grown-up ones,” Jolena said, “are very big. 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 agreed, “but they can be ferocious (fer-O-shus). The keepers have to train them to allow themselves to be touched, so the zoo veterinarians 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 far away. It makes them look close, sort of like a telescope lets you see things more closely.” 

“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 (PLAT-uh-puss)!”

“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 mammals, instead of feathers.”

“It’s looks like 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.

Cast--

Jolena: Götz Happy Kidz Lena in Aspen

Billy: Götz Happy Kidz Lily at London

Emil: Götz Happy Kidz Emilia

Pippa: Götz Little Kidz Lotta

Photos from Unsplash:

Sydney Opera House by  Susan Kuriakose  on  Unsplash

Kangaroo by  John Torcasio  on  Unsplash

Wombat by  Meg Jerrard  on  Unsplash

Wombat with keeper by  David Clode  on  Unsplash

Tasmanian Devil by  Lottie Corin  on  Unsplas h

Koala by  Vish K  on  Unsplash

Opossum by  Robert Linder  on  Unsplash

Other photos:

Wallaby by  Smithsonian National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute , cropped. 

Platypus by  Stefan Kraft - Sydney Aquarium   

For more fun with Australia’s special animals check out the “target pouch training” at the  Wild Life Sydney Zoo , but get your parents’ permission first. 

Then watch what the platypus at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park is doing right now with their  Platypus Cam .

You can follow The Doll’s Storybook  here .

Do you have questions or comments for us? Would you like to order an autographed copy of one of our books? You can email us at thedollsstorybook@icloud.com.

Note: No dolls were harmed during production of this blog. All dolls shown are Götz Happy Kidz, Classic Kidz or Little Kidz. If you like these stories and are willing, please make a donation of any amount to  St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital  or any organization that supports pediatric cancer research and treatment. We are not affiliated with St. Jude in any way other than these donations.

"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.

Do you like our stories? Some of them are available in print:

The stories in Mariah: Stories from The Doll’s Storybook are Being Little, Besties and Distraction.

The stories in Emil: Stories from The Doll’s Storybook are Best Buds, Getting What You Want and The Boys Cook Dinner.

The stories in Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll’s Storybook are Little Green Greatcoat, The Boy Doll Who Cried Wolf and Lost in the Woods.

Our book of poems, Our Favorite Verses: Poems from The Doll’s Storybook includes Valentine’s Day, Keeping Pets, Back to School, Victor the Vulture, The Week Before Christmas, Insomnia and Veronika’s Vocabulary Verses.

The stories in More Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll’s Storybook are Welcoming a Stranger, The Rescue, Unmasked, Fuzzy Town––A Play and Sky Blue.

Available now from BookBaby and other booksellers: Billy: Stories from The Doll’s Storybook. The Stories in Billy: Stories from The Doll’s Storybook are Talking About Boys, Changes, Shhhhh!, Staying After and Money in a Jar.

If you don’t get free shipping from Amazon or B&N, buy from the BookBabyBookshop, because 50% of the price goes to St. Jude. Other booksellers pay much less, because the vendor gets a cut. The Writer’s author’s page at Book Baby is here. Scroll down and click on any of the books that interest you. Find our books at Barbara’s Bookstore as well, or ask your library to get them for you.

Note: This blog post was produced on the iPad and the MacBook, using the iPhone for some photos and some photo processing. No other computer was used in any stage of composition or posting, and no Windows were opened, waited for, cleaned or broken. No animals or dolls were harmed during the production of this blog post.

<a href="https://www.bloglovin.com/blog/198325... my blog with Bloglovin</a>

Copyright © 2022, 2026 by Peggy Stuart

“What are you doing?” Pippa asked. She had been watching Jolena. The older doll seemed to be working on some kind of worksheet. She would read, then look off into space and mutter to herself.

Jolena looked at Pippa. “Hi, Pippa,” she said. “I’m trying to learn Spanish.”

“What's Spanish?” Pippa asked.

“It’s a language.” Jolena replied, “like English, the language we speak here. It’s a way dolls speak in some other countries, and some dolls here, too. It’s hard to understand dolls who speak a different language from you unless you learn it, too.”

“Why?” Pippa asked.

“Why, what?” Jolena asked in return.

“Why don’t all dolls speak the same language?” Pippa asked.

“Well,” Jolena said, “I’m not sure, but people tend to speak different languages in different places. I mean, everyone in one place seems to mostly use the same language. I noticed it when I went to Chile (CHEEL-eh) last summer. Dolls speak the languages their human families do.”

“Chilly?” Pippa asked.

“Not Chilly, Chile,” Jolena said, saying the name of the place like “Chee-leh.” She remembered that Pippa wasn’t part of the family yet when she went to Chile.

“This year,” Jolena explained, “the ski team went to Argentina (ar-jen-TEEN-uh). That’s close to Chile. I noticed that the dolls who live there speak Spanish, too.”

“Say something in Spanish,” Pippa begged. “I want to hear how it sounds.”

“¡Buenos dias! ¿Cómo estás?” Jolena said. It sounded like “BWEH-nose DEE-ahs. KOH-mo ess-TAHS.”

“What did you say?” Pippa asked. “I mean, what does that mean?”

“It means ‘Good morning! How are you?’” Jolena replied.

“What's the upside-down question mark for?” Pippa asked, moving her hands as if she were turning something upside-down. 

Jolena didn't know how Pippa knew about that. Maybe Pippa could see what Jolena was imagining in her head, or maybe she saw it on Jolena’s worksheet, but she explained, “When you write in Spanish, the question marks and the exclamation marks come at the beginning and the end, instead of just at the end, the way we write in English, but you write it upside-down at the beginning of the sentence.” Jolena demonstrated on her paper, so Pippa could see. She wrote, “¿Cómo?”

“Why?” Pippa asked as Jolena added a little mark over the first 'o'.

“I don't know why,” Jolena answered. “Maybe it's just their custom, something they got used to doing.”

“I know why,” said Mariah, who had been reading nearby and happened to overhear the conversation.

Pippa and Jolena looked at Mariah expectantly. Mariah reads a lot and seems to know many things. There could be a connection.

“It’s because of the word order,” Mariah explained. “I was reading about the different ways languages can vary from each other. It isn’t just that they have different words for things. The words may be put together differently. In English we change the order of the words in a sentence if we're asking a question,” she said. “If I said, ‘You are happy,’ that would be a statement. I would be saying that you’re happy, and I know it. If I changed the same words around and said, ‘Are you happy?’ you would know it was a question, because the verb––the action word––comes first.” 

“It isn’t that way in Spanish,” Mariah explained. “The word order is the same whether it's a question or a statement of fact. You can hear the difference when dolls are speaking, because their voices rise and fall differently for questions than for statements, but when you write, you can’t hear that. The reader needs more help to know it’s a question for reading Spanish.”

“Why?” Pippa asked.

“Yes!” Mariah exclaimed. “You just reminded me! I was going to forget to mention that we have words we use that also help us tell when something is a question. ‘Why’ is one of them. Spanish has those words, too. Not every question has one of these helping words, though.”

“I meant,” Pippa explained, “why are the languages different? Why don’t we all speak the same language? It seems very inconvenient.”

“Well,” Mariah began, “languages were developed by human people, so they could work together. Different languages came from different parts of the world, the same way real human people began to look different from each other in different places. They changed slowly over time. Before planes, trains and cars were invented, people mostly stayed where they were or only traveled to places they could walk to. When people started making dolls, they made them to be like them, so dolls in different places mostly speak the language the people speak there.”

Then Mariah thought of something she wanted to ask Jolena. “I was wondering,” she began, “you have been to South America several times to ski when it’s summer here. Why didn’t you start to learn Spanish before you went the first time?”

“Other dolls make the arrangements,” Jolena explained. “They help us when we get there. Unless we go into town, we don’t need to know Spanish, and even then, the dolls who sell things can speak enough English to help if you want to buy something.”

“This year,” Jolena continued, “Jack, a doll on the ski team who can speak some Spanish, invited me to go with him to do some shopping in town.”

“When we were in the stores,” Jolena explained, “Jack made an effort use Spanish to talk to the dolls who worked there. He was able to talk with them about things that didn’t have anything to do with the things they were selling. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but he told me later.”

“It looked like a lot of fun,” Jolena continued, “and the dolls in the stores seemed to enjoy it, so I decided I would try to learn a little Spanish, too, because we will probably go back to South America to ski again. I noticed it makes the Spanish-speaking dolls smile when you try to talk to them in their language.”

Pippa remembered that Emil was learning sign language. That looked like fun.

She remembered that Charlotte and Mariah are learning the different languages their worship services use. That looked like fun, too. 

“Hmmm,” Pippa said. “Maybe I should learn another language, too.” Then she thought about it for a moment. “Except,” she said then, “I never seem to go anywhere.”

“Pippa,” Jolena said, “you never know where life will take you. Knowing another language besides English is always useful, and I’m learning that it’s fun, even if you only use it at home. In fact, I'll teach you how to say something right now in Spanish. It should be the first thing you will want to learn.”

“What is it?” Pippa wanted to know.

“¿Por qué?” Jolena replied. She said it the way you would ask a question. It sounded like “por-KAY?”

“What does that mean,” Pippa asked the older doll.

“I’ll bet I know,” Mariah cried excitedly. “It’s your favorite word in English. You use it all the time,” she said. “Why!”  

“That reminds me,” Jolena interjected. “I’m fixing burritos (burr-EE-toes) de frijoles (free-HOLE-es) y (EE) arroz (AR-oes) for supper*.”

“Little donkeys?” Mariah asked. (She didn’t know much Spanish, but Mariah reads a lot, and she knew that a burro is a donkey, and that “-ito” or “-ita” on the end of the name of something meant it was little.)

[image error]

Jolena laughed. “No,” she said. “You take a tortilla––that’s a kind of a circle of flat bread––and wrap it around some kind of filling. I’m using frijoles y queso. That’s beans and cheese. We’ll have them with arroz. That’s rice.”

“That’s good,” Pippa said, relieved. “I think little donkeys are cute. I wouldn’t want to pretend to eat one, even if it was little.”

[image error]

No, Pippita, you would not want to pretend to eat a little donkey, but you will love pretending to eat a burrito. Just wait!

Cast--

Jolena: Götz Happy Kidz Lena in Aspen

Mariah: Götz Happy Kidz Mariah, “Chosen” from My Doll Best Friend

Pippa: Götz Little Kidz Lotta

Emil and Jack: Götz Happy Kidz Emilia

Charlotte: Götz Happy Kidz Anna in Paris

*Jolena’s Burritos con Queso are very easy to make. You will need:

one flour tortilla for each burrito

grated cheese (jack or cheddar)

salsa to your taste. (Jolena likes to pretend to eat very spicy food, but the other dolls in the family pretend to burn their mouths if it's too spicy.)

refried beans (homemade or canned)

Preheat the oven to 350ºF or 177ºC.

Using cooking spray, spray a sheet of foil large enough for all the burritos you’re making to fit when it’s folded over them. Spoon some refried beans down the center of each tortilla. Spoon some salsa (to taste) on top of the beans. Top with cheese. Fold up the two sides of the tortilla to make a burrito. Stack the burritos on the foil and fold up it up to contain them all inside. Put the package on a cookie sheet or in an oven-proof pan.

Bake for 30 minutes.

(You can also use parchment paper for this, but it’s harder to keep the package from opening up. You may need help from an adult.)

You can follow The Doll's Storybook  here .

Do you have questions or comments for us? Would you like to order an autographed copy of one of our books? You can email us at thedollsstorybook@icloud.com.

Note: No dolls were harmed during production of this blog. All dolls shown are Götz Happy Kidz, Classic Kidz or Little Kidz. If you like these stories and are willing, please make a donation of any amount to  St. Jude Children's Research Hospital  or any organization that supports pediatric cancer research and treatment. We are not affiliated with St. Jude in any way other than these donations.

“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.

Do you like our stories? Some of them are available in print:

The stories in Mariah: Stories from The Doll’s Storybook are Being Little, Besties and Distraction.

The stories in Emil: Stories from The Doll’s Storybook are Best Buds, Getting What You Want and The Boys Cook Dinner.

The stories in Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll’s Storybook are Little Green Greatcoat, The Boy Doll Who Cried Wolf and Lost in the Woods.

Our book of poems, Our Favorite Verses: Poems from The Doll’s Storybook includes Valentine's Day, Keeping Pets, Back to School, Victor the Vulture, The Week Before Christmas, Insomnia and Veronika's Vocabulary Verses.

The stories in More Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll’s Storybook are Welcoming a Stranger, The Rescue, Unmasked, Fuzzy Town––A Play and Sky Blue.

Available now from BookBaby and other booksellers: Billy: Stories from The Doll’s Storybook. The Stories in Billy: Stories from The Doll’s Storybook are Talking About Boys, Changes, Shhhhh!, Staying After and Money in a Jar.

If you don’t get free shipping from Amazon or B&N, buy from the BookBabyBookshop, because 50% of the price goes to St. Jude. Other booksellers pay much less, because the vendor gets a cut. The Writer’s author’s page at Book Baby is here. Scroll down and click on any of the books that interest you. Find our books at Barbara’s Bookstore as well, or ask your library to get them for you.

Note: This blog post was produced on the iPad and the MacBook, using the iPhone for some photos and some photo processing. No other computer was used in any stage of composition or posting, and no Windows were opened, waited for, cleaned or broken. No animals or dolls were harmed during the production of this blog post.

<a href="https://www.bloglovin.com/blog/198325... my blog with Bloglovin</a>

Copyright © 2021, 2014, 2026 by Peggy Stuart

“Why is Jolena packing?” Emil asked as he and Billy looked in through the door of the workroom. “Is she going somewhere?”

“It’s time for her yearly ski trip,” Billy replied.
The boys got up on the table to watch Jolena pack. They could see that she had her pajamas and sleep mask in a small bag, and was putting her ski clothes in the larger bag, with her ski boots. Her skis were sticking out of a long, black bag. They thought her poles must be in there, too. Jolena was looking at her special T-shirt. All the dolls would be wearing their Ski Team T-shirts under their ski clothes. She must be thinking about seeing her friends.

Emil was confused. “Doesn’t she need snow to ski?” he asked. “It’s summertime. There’s no snow right now.”

“She’s going to Chile (CHEE-leh),” Billy explained. “It’s winter there right now. They have lots of snow.”

The boys left Jolena to her packing and went down the stairs. It took a while, and while they were making their way down the stairs, Emil was thinking.

“It must be chilly in Chilly if they have snow.” he said.
Billy laughed. It’s chilly there,” he said, but the country is named Chile,” and he pronounced it again for Emil, CHEE-leh. “It’s winter there now. It’s in South America,” Billy added. “South America is a continent, like North America, where we live. Come, and I’ll show you on a map where Chile is.”

The Writer’s laptop computer moves around the house a lot. Sometimes it goes outside, too, but Billy always seems to know where it is. Emil followed Billy Into the dining room, and there was the laptop. Billy turned it on. Then he hit a few keys on the keyboard. (Billy is allowed to use the computer whenever The Writer isn’t using it. He uses it to fix the photos he takes for these stories. He knows to be careful with it.)

A map of South America appeared on the computer screen. Billy pointed to where Chile was on the map. “That’s Chile,” he said. “It’s this very long, skinny country on the western side of the continent, right along the coast.” 

The boys looked at the map. The human people who made the map made each country a different color, so you could see where the borders were, but if you looked down from a satellite, the countries wouldn’t be those colors. They would all be white where there was snow, green if there were forests, yellow or brown if nothing was growing and blue where there was water.

The map looked like this: 

If you look at the map you can see Chile. It’s colored brown on this map. Can you find the name of the country? It's out in the ocean, next to it.
“There are some mountains along almost the whole west coast of South America,” Billy explained. “They’re some of the highest mountains on earth. They’re called the Andes (ANN-deez). 

“Jolena’s going to a ski resort here,” Billy continued, as he pointed to a place on the map about halfway down the country. “It's very high up in the mountains, and they have snow to ski on right now.”
“Wow!” Emil exclaimed. “Is she going all alone?”

“She’s going with the whole US Doll Ski Team,” Billy replied. “They’re all flying together in a plane to Chile to practice. While they’re there, Jolena will fly through the air on her skis.”
“That’s a lot of flying,” Emil said.

“I’m wondering, though, how can it be winter there when it’s summer here?” Emil wanted to know.

“Mandy explained it to us when spring came last year,” Billy said. Billy hit a few keys on the computer. It went to The Doll’s Storybook blog. Billy found the story “It's Spring.”

“Let’s read it,” Emil suggested.
“That’s a great idea,” Billy said, “but let’s use the tablet to read it, so we can get comfortable.” The boys settled down in the big beanbag chair and read the story. Emil paid special attention to the part about how the earth goes around the sun and how that makes the seasons in the different parts of the world.

When they were done reading the story, Emil understood how it could be winter in part of the world when it was summer in another part.
While the boys were reading the story, Jolena finished packing. She would need to take warm clothes with her, as well as her skis and ski equipment. That means a lot of luggage. The boys had just finished reading the story when Jolena appeared in the living room. “It’s almost time for my ride to get here,” she said. “I want to say goodbye.”

The dolls gathered in the front hall. Jolena said goodbye to each of her sisters and brothers. Each doll got a hug, because they all like hugs.

“I think your ride is here,” announced Billy, who had been watching out the window.

“I think I’m missing something,” Jolena said, putting her skis down and looking around. “I am! I forgot my helmet and my goggles! I can’t ski without those.”

“We’ll take your things out to the car,” Mandy suggested, “while you go get your helmet and goggles. That way your ride won’t have to wait.”

As the dolls were just finishing putting Jolena’s luggage into the car, Jolena rushed to the door with her helmet. “My mittens were in my helmet,” she cried. “If I had left those behind I would have frozen my little vinyl fingers off!”

After Jolena got into the car, the girls started back up the stairs, but the boys watched as the car drove away.

Emil watched out the window for a long time after the car was gone.
The other dolls would miss Jolena, but it would be nice to imagine her in all that snow in Chile.

“Who’s going to cook for us while Jolena is away?” Emil asked Billy.

Cast--
Veronika: Götz Classic Kidz Vroni
Mandy: Götz Happy Kidz Katie 2015
Jolena: Götz Happy Kidz Lena in Aspen
Charlotte: Götz Happy Kidz Anna in Paris
Mariah: Götz Happy Kidz Mariah, "Chosen" from My Doll Best Friend
Billy: Götz Happy Kidz Lily at London
Emil: Götz Happy Kidz Emilia

Map of South America is from Geology.com and is found here.
Photo of skier by Felipe Giacometti on Unsplash, cropped.

You can follow The Doll's Storybook here.Do you have questions or comments for us? Would you like to order an autographed copy of one of our books? You can email us at thedollsstorybook@icloud.com.

Note: No dolls were harmed during production of this blog. All dolls shown are Götz Happy Kidz, Classic Kidz or Little Kidz. If you like these stories and are willing, please make a donation of any amount to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital or any organization that supports pediatric cancer research and treatment. We are not affiliated with St. Jude in any way other than these donations.
"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.
Do you like our stories? Some of them are available in print:
The stories in More Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Welcoming a Stranger, The Rescue, Unmasked, Fuzzy Town––A Play and Sky Blue.
Our Favorite Verses: Poems from The Doll's Storybook. Poems included are Valentine's Day, Keeping Pets, Back to School, Victor the Vulture, The Week Before Christmas, Insomnia and Veronika's Vocabulary Verses.
The stories in Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Little Green Greatcoat, The Boy Doll Who Cried Wolf and Lost in the Woods.
The stories in Emil: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Best Buds, Getting What You Want, and The Boys Cook Dinner.
The stories in Mariah: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Being Little, Besties, and Distraction.
Coming soon: Billy: Stories from The Doll's Storybook.

If you don't get free shipping from Amazon or B&N, buy from the BookBabyBookshop, because 50% of the price goes to St. Jude. Other booksellers pay much less, because the vendor gets a cut. My author's page at Book Baby is here. Scroll down and click on any of the books that interest you. Find my books at Barbara's Bookstore as well.
Note: This blog post was produced on the iPad and the MacBook, using the iPhone for some photos and some photo processing. No other computer was used in any stage of composition or posting, and no Windows were opened, waited for, cleaned or broken. No animals or dolls were harmed during the production of this blog post.
<a href="https://www.bloglovin.com/blog/198325... my blog with Bloglovin</a>

Copyright © 2020, 2025, 2026 by Peggy Stuart

"Why is this piece of wood so heavy?" Pippa asked Emil as they walked into the workroom. "I can't even pick it up!"

Emil looked at the doorstop. "I guess that's why The Writer uses it for a doorstop," he said, "but I don't know why it's so heavy. Maybe it's a special kind of wood." Then he thought for a moment. "You know," he said, "I would like to know that, too. Let's ask Mandy!"

It just so happened that Mandy was already in the workroom, picking out some yarn to make Pippa a sweater for the cooler weather that she knew was coming.

"Mandy," Emil began, "we were wondering why the piece of wood we use for a doorstop is so heavy."

Mandy put down the yarn she was holding. "It's heavy because it's petrified (PET-rih-fyd)," she explained.

"You mean the wood is scared?" Pippa asked.

"No," Mandy laughed. "Something is petrified when it's turned to rock. We say someone is petrified when we want to say they are so frightened they can't move, but that expression comes from things that are actually petrified, like wood that has turned into rock. Petrified wood is a special kind of fossil (FAW-sil). Fossils are plants or animals that lived long ago and turned to rock, or something they left behind, like footprints, turned to rock."

"Most petrified things are or were wood," Mandy continued, "but anything that was once alive can turn to rock if the conditions are right."

"What are conditions?" Pippa asked. 

Mandy looked at Emil to see if he knew how to answer Pippa's question. She always tries to let others explain things they already know. Mandy doesn't need to show off.

"I think that means that all the things that can affect what happens to something are a certain way," he said. "I don't know what conditions it takes for something to turn to rock, though," he added.

"Well," Mandy urged, "what usually happens to living plants when they die?"

Emil thought about that. 

"They rot and turn into compost!" Emil exclaimed suddenly, "like how we make compost for the garden!"

"Yes," Mandy agreed. 

"The parts of fruits and vegetables we don't eat," Emil explained to Pippa, "and grass and other clippings from the landscaping go into the composter, where they rot or decay and turn into compost to nourish the plants in the garden, but they can also lie around where they died, and the same thing happens, but more slowly."

"Do you remember what is needed for things to rot or decay?" Mandy asked.

Pippa looked at Emil, expectantly.

"I think you said you need a little water, some insects and other creatures, some too small to see without a microscope," Emil said. "You also said you need oxygen (OX-ih-jen), just like human people need to breathe."

"That's right!" Mandy agreed. "Most wood decays (dee-KAYZ) or rots when it lies around. Insects eat it and it falls apart. It becomes part of the soil it came from. Sometimes, though," Mandy continued, "a tree or parts of trees fall over and are covered up quickly by sand or mud or something called ash, which comes from volcanoes. (Volcanoes are places where melted rock from deep in the earth comes to the surface.) Insects can't get at the wood, and it doesn't rot or decay."

"So how does it turn to rock?" Pippa asked.

"Water can get still into where the wood is," Mandy explained, "even after the mud and sand and ash have turned to rock. The water gets into the cells and the tiny spaces in the wood and brings with it minerals––that's what rock is made up of––and the minerals harden. After a long time, the wood is mostly rock, but very hard, heavy rock. Then we say it's petrified."

"How long does that take?" Pippa wanted to know.

"Usually millions of years," Mandy told her. 

"But this piece of petrified wood isn't inside a rock," Emil pointed out.

"That's right!" Mandy agreed. "The rock it was in has been worn away. After many years of weather, the softer rock surrounding the petrified wood can wear away. We can find pieces of this wood, which has been turned to rock, where the surrounding rock is gone."

"It still looks like wood, though," Emil pointed out.

"It does," Mandy agreed, "and sometimes you can actually see the original rings in the wood, the way you can see the rings in a  tree that has been cut down. Come, and I'll show you."

Pippa and Emil followed Mandy into the laundry room. There was another piece of petrified wood on the floor, holding that door open.

The dolls could see that it looked like a piece of a log that had been cut. It was heavy and hard to pick up, but Mandy wanted them to be able to look at the rings, so she gently turned the rock to lie flat. She did it carefully, because she didn't want to damage the floor.

"This piece of wood was buried 200 million years ago," Mandy said. It was inside rock for much of that time.

The dolls looked at the piece of petrified wood. They could just make out the rings from the original wood.

"When we were hiking in the forest, I remember seeing rings in a tree stump," Emil said.

"Yes," Mandy agreed. 

"Pippa hasn't seen them," Mandy said. "Pippa, would you like to go for a hike and look at some tree stumps where trees have been cut down?"

"Yes!" Pippa exclaimed. She didn't get to go out in the woods very often.

Mandy and Emil put on their hats, and the dolls let themselves out the front door. When they got to the place on the street that was across from the entrance to the trail, Mandy took Pippa's hand. "Hold my hand," she said, "so I don't accidentally run out in front of a car or a bicycle."

All three dolls looked both ways before they crossed.

"I think I remember where there were a few trees that had been cut down and showed the rings," Mandy told them as they walked along the trail. 

Then Mandy stopped. "Here's this one." she said. "It hasn't been cut for too long. You can see the rings. Someone cut the tree to make a seat, but you can see the rings where they cut across the trunk of the tree."

"Why do trees have rings inside them?" Pippa asked.

"To get bigger, trees grow just under their skin, which we call bark," Mandy explained.

"Like when a dog yells at you?" Pippa asked.

"It's the same word," Mandy agreed, "but in this case it's used to mean the skin of a tree. Trees don't grow at the same rate all the time," Mandy continued. "Sometimes they grow faster, and sometimes the growing slows down. In the winter, the trees stop growing or hardly grow at all. Then in the spring, they start to grow again. That leaves a ring where the growing stopped. Scientists can tell how old a tree was when it was cut down by counting the rings."

"Tree rings are good for more than telling a tree's age, though," Mandy explained. "Scientists can learn things like if there was a lot of rainfall or a long time without any rain, just by looking at the rings."

The dolls moved on to another tree a little further along on the trail. The rings looked almost the same, but they were further apart, and they weren't as even. "These trees lived close together," Mandy pointed out. "They lived through some of the same weather, and they certainly grew in the same kind of weather, year after year. This tree was cut down long ago and was probably older than the other one we looked at. They show the same pattern, though."

The dolls could see the rings that showed where the tree stopped growing each year.

"Look at the center," Mandy said, pointing to the middle of the cut part of the tree. "Here you can see where the bark was when the tree was only this big around."

The dolls left the tree stump and walked along the trail until Mandy stopped at a very small tree. "This tree is probably the size that other one was when it made the smallest rings. It's a different kind of tree, but most trees here grow this way and make rings."

"One nice thing about petrified wood," Mandy explained as the dolls walked back to the house, "is that we can tell a lot about what the weather was like when they were growing, the way we can study trees that have been cut down but haven't become petrified. Petrified wood can tell us what the weather was like when the trees were growing, millions of years ago."

"I was just wondering," Emil said, "about how the bigger piece of petrified wood looked as if someone tried to cut it with a saw."

Mandy nodded. "Let's go back and look at it again," she said.

"Did they even have saws 200 million years ago?" Emil asked as they climbed the stairs. "I don't see how you could cut it with a saw now that it's turned to rock."

"There were no saws then," Mandy said when they had reached the laundry room. "In fact, there were no human people and no dolls back then. There were little animals that were the ancestors of today's human people," she continued, "but they looked nothing like human people."

"So if there were no saws," Emil wondered, "how did this piece of petrified wood get cut?"

"Well," Mandy began, "it's because the rock that this piece of wood turned into is something called quartz (KWORTS)."

"Like milk!" Pippa exclaimed. "Jolena told me that The Writer gets her milk in quarts and gallons. That's how much there is of it."

"Not quarts, like for milk," Mandy said. "Quartz sounds the same, but it ends with a 'Z' instead of 'S', and it's the name of a mineral (MIN-uh-ril). Minerals make up rocks, like the ingredients in one of Jolena's cakes."

"Well," Pippa said, "you wouldn't need a saw to cut milk unless it was frozen."

Emil and Mandy had nothing to say to that. It was true.

"So the thing about quartz," Mandy continued, "is when it gets broken, it breaks with a flat surface like this."

The three dolls thought for a while about the tree that was once in a forest, living and growing. They thought about how the tree was knocked down and buried under mud and sand or ash from a volcano, because no one was there with a saw. They thought about how here, millions of years later, they could see proof that the tree had lived and had grown. Dolls don't grow, but they find growing interesting.

After the dolls had been thinking about the petrified wood for a long time, but not long enough to turn into rock, Pippa asked, "how many doll years are in a million years?"

Mandy looked up at the ceiling, as if she might be working out a complicated arithmetic problem in her head. Then she looked at Emil, as if he might know. He didn't.

"A lot," Mandy replied finally.

"Do you know what I think is the most important thing about petrified wood?" Pippa asked.

They couldn't wait to hear.

"It makes a good doorstop," she said.

Cast--
Mandy: Götz Happy Kidz Katie 2015
Emil: Götz Happy Kidz EmiliaPippa: Götz Little Kidz Lotta

Note about collecting petrified wood: The old people in this story collected these two pieces of petrified wood when they were students, from private property where they had permission to collect. Collecting in national or state parks is not permitted, although petrified wood is plentiful and can be bought as souvenirs from gift shops near parks that have petrified wood. We should not pick up petrified wood where we do not have permission to do so. We should leave it in place for others to enjoy.

You can follow The Doll's Storybook here.Do you have questions or comments for us? Would you like to order an autographed copy of one of our books? You can email us at thedollsstorybook@icloud.com.
Note: No dolls were harmed during production of this blog. All dolls shown are Götz Happy Kidz, Classic Kidz or Little Kidz. If you like these stories and are willing, please make a donation of any amount to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital or any organization that supports pediatric cancer research and treatment. We are not affiliated with St. Jude in any way other than these donations.
"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.
Do you like our stories? Some of them are available in print:
The stories in Mariah: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Being Little, Besties and Distraction.
The stories in Emil: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Best Buds, Getting What You Want and The Boys Cook Dinner.
The stories in Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Little Green Greatcoat, The Boy Doll Who Cried Wolf and Lost in the Woods.
Our book of poems, Our Favorite Verses: Poems from The Doll's Storybook includes Valentine's Day, Keeping Pets, Back to School, Victor the Vulture, The Week Before Christmas, Insomnia and Veronika's Vocabulary Verses.
The stories in More Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Welcoming a Stranger, The Rescue, Unmasked, Fuzzy Town––A Play and Sky Blue.
Available now from BookBaby and other booksellers:  Billy: Stories from The Doll's Storybook . The Stories in Billy: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Talking About Boys, Changes, Shhhhh!, Staying After and Money in a Jar.

If you don't get free shipping from Amazon or B&N, buy from the BookBabyBookshop, because 50% of the price goes to St. Jude. Other booksellers pay much less, because the vendor gets a cut. The Writer's author's page at Book Baby is here. Scroll down and click on any of the books that interest you. Find our books at Barbara's Bookstore as well, or ask your library to get them for you.
Note: This blog post was produced on the iPad and the MacBook, using the iPhone for some photos and some photo processing. No other computer was used in any stage of composition or posting, and no Windows were opened, waited for, cleaned or broken. No animals or dolls were harmed during the production of this blog post.
<a href="https://www.bloglovin.com/blog/198325... my blog with Bloglovin</a>

Copyright © 2021, 2026 by Peggy Stuart 

Billy saw that it was a nice day. He wanted to practice throwing his frisbee, but he couldn't do it alone. That would be no fun. He went looking for someone to play with him.


"Who would like to go to the trail and throw the frisbee around," he asked the other dolls.

"I will," said Mariah.
"I will," said Mandy.
Both dolls raised their hands, so Billy would know they wanted to come.



The three dolls walked to the trail and looked for a wide space where they could throw the frisbee without hitting anything.



They played for a while with the frisbee. They did a lot of throwing, running and catching.


Then Billy noticed something. "What are all these things?" he asked pointing to the trail. 


The other dolls looked where Billy was pointing. There were lots of prickly looking things lying all over the ground.


"Those are pine cones," Mandy said. "They hold the seeds for the pine trees and keep them safe until it's time for them to grow." 


"Why are they on the ground?" asked Mariah, looking at the pine cones.


"Well," Mandy began, "they need to be on the ground so the seeds can have dirt to grow in."
"But how did they get there?" Billy wanted to know. "Who put them there?"
"Let's sit down," Mandy suggested. "This will take a while to explain, and we can't talk while we're throwing the frisbee."
The dolls sat down on a bench next to the trail. Before she said anything, Mandy looked off far away, as if she might be thinking about something.


"Do you remember when you left the factory in your box?" Mandy asked. She was remembering how she stood in her box in the factory.



"I remember," Mariah said. "I was wondering what my new home would be like."


"I remember, too," said Billy, "but I don't want to think about it, because they dressed me in girl's clothes."


The two girls nodded, because they remembered when Billy came.
"They didn't know I was a boy." He said.
The girls nodded again.
"Well, we got that straightened out," Mandy reminded him. "The point I was trying to make about that time is that the factory is on the other side of the earth. Your box didn't fly off into space. It stayed right where someone put it, unless it got knocked over."


"Something called gravity (GRA-veh-tee) held our boxes down," Mandy explained, "even though we were on the other side of the earth. Gravity is what holds us down, so we don't float away. It holds everything to the earth. No matter where you are, gravity will keep you from floating away."
"What does that have to do with pine cones?" Mariah asked.


"Gravity," Mandy explained, "is how the pine cones got to the ground. They started out in the trees, you see," she went on. "The tree grows pine cones to protect the seeds until the seeds are ready and it's warm enough for new trees to grow." Mandy got up and climbed down from the bench. "Let's go sit on that log," she suggested. "I think we can see the trees better from there.
The dolls went to the big log Mandy pointed to. They climbed up and sat on it.


"I thought cones were to put ice cream in," Billy said after the dolls were settled on the log.
Mandy tried to roll her eyes, but that isn't easy because her eyes don't move. "That's a different kind of cone," she said. "They don't grow on trees."
"I thought the tree made pine cones to feed the squirrels," Mariah said, who had seen squirrels taking stuff out of the pinecones and eating it.


"They do feed the squirrels," Mandy agreed, "and the squirrels help by planting the seeds. They put them in the ground to save them for later, but they forget some of them. Those seeds can grow into trees."
"Gravity is how the cones got to the ground," Mandy went on. "You can see some of them still in the tree." She pointed up at the branches on the tree. 


The dolls could see some pine cones still in the trees.


"The tree only holds the cones up there until it's time for the seeds to grow. Then it lets go," she explained.
"I've got it, I think!" Mariah cried. "Gravity is why the cones fall to the ground instead of just hanging around in the air or floating away, just like our boxes on the other side of the world didn't float away."


"That's right," Mandy agreed. "Unless something stops the cones, they land on the ground, like this one."


"What would stop them?" asked Billy.
"They could land on something else before they reach the ground," Mandy explained, "like the one in that bush." She showed them a pine cone that had landed on the branches of a bush.


"The cone will stay there unless the wind blows it away," Mandy said, "or something bumps into the branches. The branches are stronger than the cone is heavy, but they bend."

Mandy thought for a moment. "Gravity was discovered a long time ago by a man named Isaac Newton. There is a story that he was lying under an apple tree," she went on.


"Because it was an apple tree," Mandy continued, "it had apples instead of pine cones, and one of the apples fell from the tree and landed on the ground. Isaac Newton started thinking about what made the apple fall and figured out gravity." 

"Look," Billy said, pointing. "I think someone nailed some boards onto the tree to make a ladder, so they could climb the tree. I guess they had to use nails, so gravity wouldn't make the boards fall to the ground."



Billy ran over to the tree and started to climb up it. 


Billy's hat came loose from his head and fell off.
"Come down, Billy," Mandy called to him. "If you climb any higher, you may learn about gravity the hard way, and it's time to go home."
Billy came back down quickly. He wanted to get his hat before the wind blew it away. He picked it up and put it back onto his head.


"Too bad Jolena didn't come with us," said Billy as the dolls started walking home. "She wanted to know all about gravity, too."
"That's OK," Mariah said. "When we get home, you can explain it to her."
"Yes," agreed Mandy. "A good way to help you remember something is to explain it to someone else."
The dolls walked the rest of the way home in silence. Each doll thought about what they had seen and learned.
As they reached the house, Mariah said, "Mandy, I still don't know how gravity works. I mean, what makes gravity, and why does a balloon float?"


Mandy paused at the door. "For that," she said, "we need to talk about something called mass. It's complicated. Let's save it for another day. I need to figure out how to show you what mass is."


"I would like to know that, too," Billy said, "and there's something else I'm wondering about. How do seeds turn into trees?"


Maybe we can plant some seeds, so you can see for yourself," she told him. "Let's try some smaller plants, though, because it works the same way, and trees can take many years."


Later that evening, Mandy found herself at the computer, looking online at seeds for vegetables and flowers that grow quickly, and finding out how to explain something called mass to other dolls.

Cast--
Mandy: Götz Happy Kidz Katie 2015
Mariah: Götz Happy Kidz Mariah, "Chosen" from My Doll Best Friend
Billy: Götz Happy Kidz Lily at London

You can follow The Doll's Storybook here.Do you have questions or comments for us? Would you like to order an autographed copy of one of our books? You can email us at thedollsstorybook@icloud.com.
Note: No dolls were harmed during production of this blog. All dolls shown are Götz Happy Kidz, Classic Kidz or Little Kidz. If you like these stories and are willing, please make a donation of any amount to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital or any organization that supports pediatric cancer research and treatment. We are not affiliated with St. Jude in any way other than these donations.
"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.
Do you like our stories? Some of them are available in print:
The stories in Mariah: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Being Little, Besties and Distraction.
The stories in Emil: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Best Buds, Getting What You Want and The Boys Cook Dinner.
The stories in Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Little Green Greatcoat, The Boy Doll Who Cried Wolf and Lost in the Woods.
Our book of poems, Our Favorite Verses: Poems from The Doll's Storybook includes Valentine's Day, Keeping Pets, Back to School, Victor the Vulture, The Week Before Christmas, Insomnia and Veronika's Vocabulary Verses.
The stories in More Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Welcoming a Stranger, The Rescue, Unmasked, Fuzzy Town––A Play and Sky Blue.
Available now from BookBaby and other booksellers:  Billy: Stories from The Doll's Storybook . The Stories in Billy: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Talking About Boys, Changes, Shhhhh!, Staying After and Money in a Jar.

If you don't get free shipping from Amazon or B&N, buy from the BookBabyBookshop, because 50% of the price goes to St. Jude. Other booksellers pay much less, because the vendor gets a cut. The Writer's author's page at Book Baby is here. Scroll down and click on any of the books that interest you. Find our books at Barbara's Bookstore as well, or ask your library to get them for you.
Note: This blog post was produced on the iPad and the MacBook, using the iPhone for some photos and some photo processing. No other computer was used in any stage of composition or posting, and no Windows were opened, waited for, cleaned or broken. No animals or dolls were harmed during the production of this blog post.
<a href="https://www.bloglovin.com/blog/198325... my blog with Bloglovin</a>

Copyright © 2019, 2025, 2026 by Peggy Stuart

"I’m glad you’re here, Pauly," Pippa told her friend as she closed the front door. "I heard Charlotte tell Emil he has a new letter from his friend Holly. Maybe he will tell us what she says."

"Isn’t Holly the friend he was in the doll hospital with?" Pauly asked. "I think you said she uses a wheelchair to get around."

"Yes," Pippa agreed, "and her letters are always interesting."

"I wonder how she makes it up the stairs," Pauly muttered, as they finally reached the top of the stairs.

"We should have Emil ask her," Pippa suggested.

The two little dolls walked into the workroom to find Emil had already opened his letter.

"Why don’t you read Holly's letter out loud," Charlotte told him. "Otherwise everyone will want to read it, and this way it will be faster."

"Yes, please!" Pippa begged him. "I don’t want to wait!"

"Sure," Emil agreed. "We can enjoy it together."

He looked at the letter again and began to read from the beginning.

Dear Emil,

I enjoyed reading about your adventures over the holidays. I decided it was a good time to bring you up to date on what Sam and I have been up to.

(Pauly remembered that Sam was the human girl Holly lives with, and that she uses a wheelchair, too.)

Wheelchair basketball started up again when school began, and Sam and I are both playing it, Sam in the one in the county that is just for real children who use wheelchairs, and I'm in the special program for dolls. It’s a lot of fun.

Sam started singing in the school choir this year. She really enjoys it, and she has made some new friends.

I would sing, too, if I could open my mouth. When she practices her part at home, though, I can hum along. She lets me look at the music with her, so I’m starting to learn how to read the notes. I think Sam has a lovely voice, but I’m sort of a fan, I guess. 

Just before school let out for the holidays, the school choir had a concert. Sam's mother brought me to the school auditorium, so I could watch. The next week, the choir went to something called a district-wide concert. All the kids in the choir got to travel in a big school bus. 

I should tell you that Sam only lives two blocks from the school, so she can get there on her own using her wheelchair when the weather is nice. They have a special little bus they use to pick up all the children who use wheelchairs, but Sam likes to do it on her own as much as she can, so she only takes the bus when the weather is bad.

For this concert, though, the whole choir rode to the big theater where they were supposed to perform, and Sam got to ride with her friends in the bus! Usually, if she has to go in a regular bus, someone has to lift her out of the wheelchair and carry her into the bus.

Then they have to find a place to store her wheelchair. It’s a really big deal. Sam doesn’t like making other kids wait. The school district just got new a bus with a special door that has a kind of elevator in it, so Sam and other kids who use wheelchairs can ride the bus with their friends. There is another little girl at the school, Sara, who also plays wheelchair basketball. The school needs the bus for her, too, so she can go on field trips with her classmates.

Sam was so excited to get to ride in the big bus with her friends. She took me along, and I was able to watch from backstage. (That’s what they call the area behind curtains at the back of the stage.) From the edges of the curtain, what they call the wings, I could see and hear. I watched them get the stage ready for all the choirs to come on to sing. It was interesting.

When the choir came out on stage, they gave Sam a place in front, so she could see the choir teacher, who was directing them, and so the audience could see her. The other kids who were in front with Sam stood on the floor. The rest of the choir stood on something called risers, sort of like bleachers at the ball field, but without seats, so people just stand on them.

After all the groups sang, we rode home again on the bus. It was so exciting to ride on the bus and watch from backstage. I have to admit that I was so happy and excited, I hummed along, but very quietly. (Many people don’t hear dolls, but some do.) 

Well, that’s all the news I have for now. Tell everyone hi from me, and happy New Year, too.

Your friend, Holly

"Wow! Pippa said. "Holly sure gets to do a lot of interesting things."

The dolls all thought about all the things Holly and Sam had done together. They thought about basketball and summer camp and how Holly helped Sam teach other children how to use a wheelchair, so they could see what it was like and got to go to the library and a real restaurant. Holly is a busy doll!

"It’s great when you find something you enjoy," Charlotte told Pauly, because for Charlotte, that was the best part. "Music is wonderful, especially when you can make it yourself. I love to play the violin, but your voice is an instrument you always have with you!"

"It’s really nice to listen to, as well," Emil pointed out. He remembered when he couldn’t hear music at all. That was back when he first met Holly at the doll hospital, when he got his special glasses that let him see and hear almost as well as other dolls.

Holly would probably never be able to get around as well as other dolls, but Emil was really glad she was getting to go places and do so many interesting things.

The dolls noticed Veronika standing in the doorway. She had been listening to Emil read the letter. "You know what I like best?" she asked the others. They waited for her to tell them.

"What I really like best," she said, when she had climbed up onto the daybed with the others, "is that Sam got to be in the front, not just so she could see the teacher, although that’s important, but because everyone can see her, and watch her sing. Some human people think other people don’t want to see a child in a wheelchair. They think it will make them sad that she has to be in a wheelchair. I think it's helps people to see a child in a wheelchair doing normal kid things."

"Maybe," Emil said, "that’s like how I was afraid you wouldn’t want me if you knew I needed special glasses to see and hear, and I need help if something happens at night while my special glasses are charging, but it’s great living here!"

"Having you in our family doesn’t make me sad," Pippa told him.

"When you know a doll who needs to do some things differently," Veronika pointed out, "and you see them all the time, you start to see the person inside, and it doesn’t make you sad."

"We’re all different in some way," Charlotte pointed out. "If someone uses a wheelchair, it’s just another way to be different."

"Wouldn’t it be boring," Veronika said, "if we were all the same kind of doll."

"What I like best," Pippa told them, "is that Sam has a friend who uses a wheelchair, too. It’s great that we’re all different, but it’s nice when you have a friend who is different the same way you are, the way Pauly is little, like me."

"That reminds me," Pauly said. "I have a question for Holly. When you write back, ask her how she gets up the stairs at home."

That’s a good question, Pauly!
Cast--
Pippa: Götz Little Kidz LottaPauly: Götz Little Kidz PaulEmil: Götz Happy Kidz EmiliaCharlotte: Götz Happy Kidz Anna in ParisHolly: Götz Little Kidz LottaVeronika: Götz Classic Kidz Vroni
Regular school bus photo: https://blog.ptvgroup.com/en/city-and-mobility/optimize-school-bus-routes/

School bus: https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/fifth-grader-lives-her-dream-of-riding-the-bus-to-school

Backstage photo: Orange County Register

Photo of choir: Peace Lutheran Church, Sioux Falls, SD. (Note: Child using wheelchair is only using it temporarily.) Link to page with photo.

You can follow The Doll's Storybook here.Do you have questions or comments for us? Would you like to order an autographed copy of one of our books? You can email us at thedollsstorybook@icloud.com.
Note: No dolls were harmed during production of this blog. All dolls shown are Götz Happy Kidz, Classic Kidz or Little Kidz. If you like these stories and are willing, please make a donation of any amount to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital or any organization that supports pediatric cancer research and treatment. We are not affiliated with St. Jude in any way other than these donations.
"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.
Do you like our stories? Some of them are available in print:
The stories in Mariah: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Being Little, Besties and Distraction.
The stories in Emil: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Best Buds, Getting What You Want and The Boys Cook Dinner.
The stories in Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Little Green Greatcoat, The Boy Doll Who Cried Wolf and Lost in the Woods.
Our book of poems, Our Favorite Verses: Poems from The Doll's Storybook includes Valentine's Day, Keeping Pets, Back to School, Victor the Vulture, The Week Before Christmas, Insomnia and Veronika's Vocabulary Verses.
The stories in More Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Welcoming a Stranger, The Rescue, Unmasked, Fuzzy Town––A Play and Sky Blue.
Available now from BookBaby and other booksellers:  Billy: Stories from The Doll's Storybook . The Stories in Billy: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Talking About Boys, Changes, Shhhhh!, Staying After and Money in a Jar.

If you don't get free shipping from Amazon or B&N, buy from the BookBabyBookshop, because 50% of the price goes to St. Jude. Other booksellers pay much less, because the vendor gets a cut. The Writer's author's page at Book Baby is here. Scroll down and click on any of the books that interest you. Find our books at Barbara's Bookstore as well, or ask your library to get them for you.
Note: This blog post was produced on the iPad and the MacBook, using the iPhone for some photos and some photo processing. No other computer was used in any stage of composition or posting, and no Windows were opened, waited for, cleaned or broken. No animals or dolls were harmed during the production of this blog post.
<a href="https://www.bloglovin.com/blog/198325... my blog with Bloglovin</a>

Copyright © 2023, 2026 by Peggy Stuart

“What are you looking at, Billy?” Emil asked when he found his brother and best friend in the living room, looking through a magnifying (MAG-nih-fy-ing) glass at what appeared to be a blank piece of paper. Emil didn’t see any writing on it. What was Billy looking at?

“Mandy told me that everything is made up of atoms (AH-tums),” Billy replied. “She said they were very small. I thought maybe I could use the magnifying glass to see the atoms that make up this paper, because they are supposed to be very tiny. A magnifying glass makes tiny things easier to see.”

As Emil climbed up on the stool next to Billy, Billy moved aside so the other doll could have a look. “It does look different,” Emil said, “but I’m not sure what I’m supposed to see. It’s still all one thing.”

“Let’s go ask Mandy,” Billy suggested. They both knew it was a Mandy question. “Maybe we aren’t using the magnifying glass right.”

The boys took the magnifying glass and paper, and climbed up the stairs to look for Mandy in the workroom, where they thought she would be, playing with her yarn.

Mandy looked up when the boys came in. She was knitting, which was not a surprise. She was wearing her earbuds plugged into a tablet, apparently listening to a music or a podcast about knitting or science. “Hi!” she said when they appeared in the doorway.

“Hi!” both boys replied in unison.

“We have a Mandy question,” Billy said, after the boys had climbed up to the table. “We’ve been looking at this piece of paper with this magnifying glass to see if we can see the atoms, but we’re not sure what we’re looking at. The paper does look different with the magnifying glass, but it’s sort of still all one thing, not a lot of little tiny things. We’re not sure if we’re seeing the atoms or not.”

“Well,” Mandy began, “that’s because you can’t really see atoms with a magnifying glass, or even with a regular microscope (MY-kro-skope), which lets you see things that are much tinier than you can see with a magnifying glass. A regular microscope can sit on a table when you use it.”

She pulled the ear buds away from her ears and moved her glasses to the top of her head. She knew this conversation was going to take some time, but it was interesting, and she likes to talk about things that interest her.

“You can only see atoms with a special microscope,” Mandy explained, “and then, you aren’t really seeing the atoms the way you would see things like that paper and this yarn, for instance.”

“Those microscopes are really very special, too,” Mandy pointed out, “so special that they’re much too expensive and much too big for someone to have in their house!”

“Gee,” sighed Billy. “I really wanted to see what an atom looks like.” Mandy thought both boys seemed disappointed.

“We may not be able to see an atom with our eyes,” Mandy told them, “but we can see it with our minds. We know enough about atoms to be able to imagine what they look like.”

The boys looked more hopeful.

“You see,” Mandy began, “We know there are parts to an atom. How many of each kind of part is what makes the difference between one thing and another, like my yarn and your piece of paper.”

Mandy thought for a moment.

Then she said, “Just imagine an atom is a tiny solar system.”

“I know what a solar system is,” Emil exclaimed, happy to find something he knew about. “We learned about it in my class at school. It’s a sun, like our sun, with planets going around it, like our Earth!”

“And like Mars!” Billy added, excited now, too, “or Jupiter (JOO-pih-ter).”

“Right,” Mandy agreed, “only instead of a sun in the center, an atom has a nucleus (NOO-klee-us). ‘Nucleus’ is a special word for the center of something. It’s used in science for atoms, as well as some other things.”

“Let me find a picture,” Mandy suggested, “to show you what we think an atom looks like, so you can imagine it in your head.” 

She reached for the tablet and opened it up.

Mandy tapped on the tablet keyboard.

In just a few seconds, she had the picture she wanted.

“Here!” she said, turning the tablet so the boys could see. “This is what an atom should look like if we see it with our minds. Here’s the nucleus,” she said, pointing to the thing in the center. “In this picture, the nucleus looks like a clump of balls all stuck together.”

“Those little balls,” Mandy explained, “are parts of the atom. The red ones are calledprotons (PRO-tonz). The blue ones are called neutrons (NEW-tronz). They aren’t really red or blue. They just have those colors in this drawing, so we can tell them apart and know that they are different.”

“The protons have what’s called a positive (PAW-zih-tiv) charge,” she told them. “That’s the name given to a type of electricity. They use a plus sign (+) as a symbol (SIM-bul) to show that it’s positive, because we use a plus sign for adding numbers.”

“The other little balls,” Mandy went on, “the red ones, those have no charge. We say they’re neutral (NEW-trul), because they are neither positive nor negative. We don’t need a symbol for that, because it isn’t either one.”

“What’s negative?” Emil asked. “It doesn’t sound happy.”

“You’re right,” Mandy said. “We say our feelings are positive if we’re happy and negative if we’re sad. Those expressions come from how we talk about electricity, but there’s nothing sad about this kind of negative.”

Mandy pointed to the little green balls outside the nucleus in the drawing. “These green balls,” she said, “are electrons (ee-LEK-trons). They have a negative (NEHG-a-tiv)charge. Scientists use a minus sign (-) for negative, because that’s the symbol we use to subtract or take away numbers in arithmetic. It doesn’t mean they’re sad. In fact,” she added, “these lines are there to show where the electrons go flying around the nucleus. What fun that must be!”

“It’s like they’re in orbit (OR-bit) around the nucleus!” Billy exclaimed. “Now I see why you said the atom is like a little solar system! The planets in our solar system are in orbit around the sun.”

Mandy nodded. “Not all atoms have the same number of protons, neutrons and electrons,” she said. “Atoms make up something called elements (EL-a-mints). Each element has a different number of each of these parts. It’s what makes them different from each other.”

“I think we should stop now,” Mandy suggested. “If I tell you more than you can remember at one time, everything in your head will probably just drain down through your neck and out through your knee joints. Besides, this story is long enough.”

“I won’t forget what I learned just now,” Emil said, “but I learned something that isn’t just about atoms.” The other two dolls looked at him. They wanted to know what else he had learned.

Emil knew that when someone just looks at you after you just said something, that meant they were waiting for you to say more, so he went on. “Just because we can’t see something,” he said, “doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”

“That’s right!” Mandy exclaimed, happy that Emil had learned something unexpected from the little lesson.

Billy picked up the magnifying glass again. “Let’s go down to the kitchen. Let’s find out if we can see some cookies,” he suggested.

Billy would not need the magnifying glass to find cookies in the kitchen.

Cast--
Mandy: Götz Happy Kidz Katie 2015
Billy: Götz Happy Kidz Lily at London
Emil: Götz Happy Kidz Emilia
Diagram of atom: FreepikPhoto of microscope: Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash
You can follow The Doll's Storybook here.Do you have questions or comments for us? Would you like to order an autographed copy of one of our books? You can email us at thedollsstorybook@icloud.com.
Note: No dolls were harmed during production of this blog. All dolls shown are Götz Happy Kidz, Classic Kidz or Little Kidz. If you like these stories and are willing, please make a donation of any amount to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital or any organization that supports pediatric cancer research and treatment. We are not affiliated with St. Jude in any way other than these donations.
"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.
Do you like our stories? Some of them are available in print:
The stories in Mariah: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Being Little, Besties and Distraction.
The stories in Emil: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Best Buds, Getting What You Want and The Boys Cook Dinner.
The stories in Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Little Green Greatcoat, The Boy Doll Who Cried Wolf and Lost in the Woods.
Our book of poems, Our Favorite Verses: Poems from The Doll's Storybook includes Valentine's Day, Keeping Pets, Back to School, Victor the Vulture, The Week Before Christmas, Insomnia and Veronika's Vocabulary Verses.
The stories in More Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Welcoming a Stranger, The Rescue, Unmasked, Fuzzy Town––A Play and Sky Blue.
Available now from BookBaby and other booksellers:  Billy: Stories from The Doll's Storybook . The Stories in Billy: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Talking About Boys, Changes, Shhhhh!, Staying After and Money in a Jar.

If you don't get free shipping from Amazon or B&N, buy from the BookBabyBookshop, because 50% of the price goes to St. Jude. Other booksellers pay much less, because the vendor gets a cut. The Writer's author's page at Book Baby is here. Scroll down and click on any of the books that interest you. Find our books at Barbara's Bookstore as well, or ask your library to get them for you.
Note: This blog post was produced on the iPad and the MacBook, using the iPhone for some photos and some photo processing. No other computer was used in any stage of composition or posting, and no Windows were opened, waited for, cleaned or broken. No animals or dolls were harmed during the production of this blog post.
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Copyright © 2022, 2026 by Peggy Stuart

 "Mariah!" Pippa exclaimed from the window. "Come look! Marbles are falling from the sky!"

Mariah came to the window to look. Pippa was right! White balls the size of marbles were falling from the sky.

Whenever one of them hit the house, the dolls could hear a 'plunk' sound. It was raining at the same time. Water was running down the street.

"Does God think we've lost our marbles?" Pippa wanted to know, looking up at Mariah. 

"I don't think so, Pippa," Mariah said. "I've seen this before, although not such big ones. It's called hail (HAYL). The little balls are made of ice."

Just then, there was a flash of light. 

Both dolls jumped. "Lightning!" Pippa cried. "It can melt your vinyl if it hits you."

Then Pippa and Mariah heard a loud boom. "Thunder," Pippa said, a little more calmly. 

Pippa turned to Mariah and said, "Mandy said thunder is the voice of the lightning. It has been a few seconds since the lightning, so it must not be very close."

"Mandy told me all about how light travels faster than sound," Pippa told Mariah solemnly. "That's why we see the lightning before we hear the thunder."

"We're safe in the house," Pippa reassured Mariah then. She was happy she knew something about what was happening, even if she had never heard of hail before.

Mariah knew about thunder and lightning, of course, and wasn't worried, but she was happy to let Pippa reassure her. It was good practice for Pippa.

"What makes the hail, I wonder," Pippa said.

Mariah wondered that, too. "I think," she said, "it has something to do with the wind up in the clouds, but I don't know enough about it to explain it. Let's go ask Mandy."

Pippa thought that was a good idea. She was really interested. By the time the dolls had climbed up the stairs and reached the workroom, the storm was over and the sun was out again. Mandy was on the daybed with the boys, looking out the window.

"We saw a hailstorm!" Pippa gushed her excitement, as she and Mariah came into the room. 

"We watched from here," Billy said. "I took some photos with my camera!"

"We heard the hail hitting the window and the roof," Emil added, "so we came to look. We were just asking Mandy what makes hail," he added.

Mandy climbed down from the daybed. She beckoned to the other dolls to follow her. Then she climbed up to the workroom table and opened up the laptop. "Come up here, and I'll show you a photo," she suggested to the other dolls. "It will help me explain it."

As the other dolls gathered around, Mandy typed in something and a picture appeared on the screen. "When there is a thunderstorm," she explained, "you sometimes can have wind that goes upward through the clouds. That wind is called an updraft. Drops of water are carried upward instead of falling as rain. If the temperature in the clouds is below freezing, the drops reach colder air and then freeze."

"They're heavier than the air," Mandy explained, "so they fall if the wind lets up a bit, but there's more to it." (Of course there's more! There's always more if Mandy is involved.) "This is what I wanted to show you," she said, pointing to the screen on the laptop. The dolls all looked at the screen. The image looked like a glass dish.

"This," Mandy explained, "is a cross section of a hailstone. A scientist cut through the middle of it, cutting it in two and then cut through it again, so it was a slice, like a slice of radish or tomato. Now you can see the layers, like the layers of an onion, from the middle to the outer edges. That shows that the piece of ice froze and then went through a place where it was damp or even wet, and that water collected all around the surface. Then it froze, too."

"Scientists are very curious people," Mandy continued. "They wondered about how these layers were made,They used to think that the ball of ice fell and then was lifted again, several times. They thought that falling through a damp part of the cloud and then getting blown upwards where it was freezing was what made the layers."

"Research has given them a new theory (THEE-uh-ree), though," Mandy said. Then she noticed a puzzled look on Pippa's face. "A theory," she explained, "is a possible explanation for how something happens when you know a lot about something but not everything."

Pippa nodded. She had lots of theories about things, she realized.

Some dolls like to think about something for a while, like Pippa. Billy is the kind of doll who just wants to get on with things. "So what's the new theory?" he asked. 

"Well," Mandy began, "you know that clouds are made of water, but they're not the same all through. There are parts where the water in them is more liquid and there are parts where the water is more like steam, only cool. It's called vapor (VAY-per). It's like a thick gas."

"According to the new theory," Mandy continued, "the ball of ice goes through areas in the cloud where the water is more liquid and parts of the cloud where the water is more like vapor. When it goes through the wetter part of the cloud, it makes this layer you can see through." Mandy pointed to the part of the photo that looked like clear glass.

"What do you suppose happens," Mandy asked, "when the ball of ice moves through the part of the cloud where the moisture is more like vapor?"

"Is that what makes the cloudy part?" Emil asked, pointing to the part of the photo where the cross section was white.

Mandy nodded, "That's the theory now," she agreed. Scientists are doing experiments to find out.

"The cross section isn't a perfect circle," Billy pointed out. "The hail we saw seemed to be perfectly round.

"They can be perfect balls or not," Mandy told them. "Sometimes they have little rounded spikes all over, and some are in between, with an uneven surface like this one."

"The ones we got were like marbles," Pippa said. "White marbles. That's what I thought they were at first."

"Speaking of marbles," Emil said, "the storm is over now. We can go outside to play!"

"Yes," Mandy agreed, "but first I have to tell you the most important thing to know about hail."

The other dolls all looked at Mandy expectantly.

"If you're outside when hail starts to fall," Mandy said, "run and find shelter as fast as you can. It doesn't happen often, but hailstones can be as big as your head sometimes!"

"My head?" Pippa wanted to know.

"Billy's head," Mandy said, "or mine, or even bigger. Those hailstones can do a lot of damage. They can break windows or put a dent in a car roof. They can squash you flat!"

All the dolls except Mandy tried very hard to make their eyes very large to show how shocking this new information was. (They couldn't do it, of course, because their eyes are what they are, but it made them feel better to try.)

Just then, Charlotte came into the room. "The Writer is going out in the car," she said. She's going to the store to buy a new barbecue cover. She sent me to ask if there's anything we need at the store."

"What's wrong with the old barbecue cover," Mandy asked her.

"Go and look at it out the window," was all Charlotte would say.

The dolls all rushed down the stairs, which is faster than going up. Then they climbed up on the windowsills where they could see the barbecue. It was shocking!

This is what they saw.

"I wonder what hailstones the size of your head would do!" Pippa exclaimed in amazement.

Mariah was speechless.

Cast--
Mandy: Götz Happy Kidz Katie 2015
Charlotte: Götz Happy Kidz Anna in Paris
Mariah: Götz Happy Kidz Mariah, "Chosen" from My Doll Best Friend
Billy: Götz Happy Kidz Lily at London
Emil: Götz Happy Kidz EmiliaPippa: Götz Little Kidz Lotta
You can follow The Doll's Storybook here.
Hail size chart: https://mrcc.purdue.edu/living_wx/hai...This hail size chart outlines the types of objects that the National Weather Service prefers to be used when reporting hail.  Using marbles as size indicator isn’t advised.
Hail cross-section photo from Wikipedia.Cloud Photo by Wolf Zimmermann on Unsplash, cropped.
You can follow The Doll's Storybook here.Do you have questions or comments for us? Would you like to order an autographed copy of one of our books? You can email us at thedollsstorybook@icloud.com.
Note: No dolls were harmed during production of this blog. All dolls shown are Götz Happy Kidz, Classic Kidz or Little Kidz. If you like these stories and are willing, please make a donation of any amount to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital or any organization that supports pediatric cancer research and treatment. We are not affiliated with St. Jude in any way other than these donations.
"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.
Do you like our stories? Some of them are available in print:
The stories in Mariah: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Being Little, Besties and Distraction.
The stories in Emil: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Best Buds, Getting What You Want and The Boys Cook Dinner.
The stories in Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Little Green Greatcoat, The Boy Doll Who Cried Wolf and Lost in the Woods.
Our book of poems, Our Favorite Verses: Poems from The Doll's Storybook includes Valentine's Day, Keeping Pets, Back to School, Victor the Vulture, The Week Before Christmas, Insomnia and Veronika's Vocabulary Verses.
The stories in More Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Welcoming a Stranger, The Rescue, Unmasked, Fuzzy Town––A Play and Sky Blue.
Available now from BookBaby and other booksellers:  Billy: Stories from The Doll's Storybook . The Stories in Billy: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Talking About Boys, Changes, Shhhhh!, Staying After and Money in a Jar.

If you don't get free shipping from Amazon or B&N, buy from the BookBabyBookshop, because 50% of the price goes to St. Jude. Other booksellers pay much less, because the vendor gets a cut. The Writer's author's page at Book Baby is here. Scroll down and click on any of the books that interest you. Find our books at Barbara's Bookstore as well, or ask your library to get them for you.
Note: This blog post was produced on the iPad and the MacBook, using the iPhone for some photos and some photo processing. No other computer was used in any stage of composition or posting, and no Windows were opened, waited for, cleaned or broken. No animals or dolls were harmed during the production of this blog post.
<a href="https://www.bloglovin.com/blog/198325... my blog with Bloglovin</a>

Copyright © 2022, 2026 by Peggy Stuart