I Lure Them in with Promises of Ponies...

Monday night I was knee-deep in My Little Ponies.

My current Dungeon Master stopped by to hang out for a few hours, kids in tow. He has a pre-teen boy and a younger girl, both being raised in a geek-friendly household. The plan was for him to chill with us for a bit, eat dinner, and talk of inconsequential things. I knew I had plenty to entertain his daughter but was a little worried about the older boy (I shouldn't have; he got sucked into the video game vacuum with the Big B just fine).

The little girl moves at the speed of light, her words tumbling out just fast enough to stay un-muddled. I show her to our "office" aka the dumping grounds for anything and everything, and currently where my large bag of My Little Ponies is stored, along with a few pony buildings and some old cookie tins filled with brushes, clips, blankets, pillows, bottles, diapers and various other Pony accessories.

I can't keep up with the word-storm that is flying out of her mouth, but the gist is that she's excited about all the ponies, especially the kinds she hadn't seen before.

"BOY ponies? There are BOY ponies?"

"You can tell by the feet," I say, pointing out how the male ponies have big hairy feet like Budweiser Clydesdale horses in the commercials.

"Oooh! I like the skinny ponies! This one has sparkles in her hair!"

"These ones come with gems instead of regular eyes," I say while pointing to my favorite ponies. She is more entralled with the fuzzy ponies, however, and goes about systematically picking them all out of the pony-pile.

"There are cats, dogs, birds, a giraffe and a lion pony too," I offer helpfully.

*super-sonic squeal*

"I just LOVE animals! Animals of all kinds. How about we both play all the animal ponies, which one do you want to be, I want to be the lion, no wait, I want to be this purple cat...."

I let her extreme enthusiasm wash over me, remembering how excited I used to get over ponies.

"Which one do you want to be?" I grab Wizard, a pink flying pegasus pony with sparkly dark purple gems in place of painted eyes.

"She was my favorite when I was your age." She nods sagely, understanding how much favorites mean to girls. She shows me her own pony collection she brought with. The ponies are from more recently, but thankfully they are not the fun-house-mirror looking ponies I've seen in the toy aisles at Target. All of her ponies are sporting mohawks, courtesy of a "make over" session with her BFF.

"This one lost it's tail when I gave it a buzz cut," and she displays a tail-less pony proudly. I point out the few ponies that received haircuts from me years ago, but tell her that makeovers are good for one evening of fun, but whereas real hair grows back for more cutting fun, ponies are sadly limited in their ability to grow new hair.

Kids say the darndest things.

We are in the spare bedroom, where I grab the first season of My Little Pony on DVD.

"What's that?" and her eyes shine even more excitedly, if that's possible.

"This is the cartoon, do you want to watch? We can learn how the My Little Ponies came to be," I tell her.

"You mean we can be playing ponies at the same time we watch them on TV?" I nod.

"That's like Live Action Role Playing! I think it's called LARPing."

I should have known better, but I am tickled just the same. How many 9-year olds do you know that would know what LARPing is?

I put the pilot episode in the DVD player and let the familiar tunes wash over me. When it comes time for the sea pony musical number, we grab all the sea ponies I own and I find myself waving them in the air as if they were swimming, the little girl and I making our very own school of brightly-colored sea ponies.

I feel self-conscious at first, thinking how silly it is to be waving plastic seahorses in the air for no apparent purpose, but then I see how bright and shining her eyes are that we are playing together, and I can only smile and remember how much cooler it was when the grown-ups played too.

I apologize if you get this tune stuck in your head...it's insidiously sticky like that.

I think that's why it's invariably the favorite of any little who I've shown it to.

Unfortunately it is a week night, and her Dad comes to collect her to head home eventually. She puts up a bit of fuss but she's a good kid and starts tossing ponies back into the bag from which they came.

"Dad, can we come back sometime? Could we do a sleepover? I wanna do a sleepover."

I tell her I'd love to have a sleepover, winking at Dad and telling him sotto voce "Next time you need a sitter on the weekend or I have vacation during the week, I'd love to."

"How about this Wednesday?" She looks at me. "What are you doing Wednesday?"

Ah, the siren call of My Little Ponies. I knew the lure would work well!

I giggle and her dad says that we'll work it out for the future. He takes out his phone to take a picture of her pony-land creation just before we start to pick up, all the ponies painstakingly set upright in their dwellings with others hanging by their chubby little legs from the drawer handles of my craft-station.She makes a goofy face and demands a picture with our cat Gizmo, the scary monster for the ponies and by her proclamation the "coolest cat in the world" (I showed her how he plays fetch, and I'm sure his recent haircut was a big factor in this decision as well).

They leave and bed calls...

...but this morning the strains of "Shoo-be-doo, shoo-shoo-be-doo" are running through my head as I shower and I can't help but allow the big grin to surface, thinking how much fun it would be to have a sea pony with me, smiling at me with her horsey-smile and twinkling eyes.