Abigail has been pretty used to going to bed with her Mama lately, and isn’t one to take a change – like Daddy taking her to sleep, for example – lying down. Tonight I managed to grease the wheels with her through the light-up frog we got at Hannah’s birthday party the other day. I then followed it up with a story about her Ponies. Her little ponies. She has four now. They doubled their herd this weekend due to a particularly prolific garage sale.

The first thing I needed to do was to determine the ponies names. I couldn’t very well call them, “Purple Pony” and “Pink Pony,” could I? Abigail informed me that the baby pony’s name was Tutu. I then asked the other names and found out that they were all named Tutu. So I called them, “Purple Tutu,” “Pink Tutu,” along with “Blue Mama Tutu” and “Blue Baby Tutu.”

They wanted to do what all ponies want to do: get groomed. I asked Abigail if she knew what “groom” meant and she said that she did. It meant “you go over there and down there and zoom and,” she stuck two finger in my neck and wiggled them. “I groomed you.”

This won her an especially large hug.

As it turns out, Purple Tutu had left the grooming brush on her windowsill in their floating city and it had fallen out into the forest below. Good think Pink Tutu has wings. She carried them all down to the forest where they split up to search. It was a dark and scary forest; splitting up was a narrative inevitability.

Blue Mama Tutu and Blue Baby Tutu came to a bog, where a familiar glowing frog told them that he might have seen something fall out of the sky. If they could help him, he would help them. You see, the frog was hungry, because all of the flies had gone somewhere else.

Meanwhile, Purple Tutu and Pink Tutu had reached the edge of the forest, where they found an enormous pile of trash someone had dumped there. As you might expect, it was covered with flies. Purple Tutu wasn’t having this. She used her special trash removal magic power, shaking her purple mane, and the trash disappeared.

The flies, realizing that their banquet had left, decided to hightail it back to the bog, where the frog was so happy that he immediately started glowing. He told Blue Mama Tutu and Blue Baby Tutu that something brush-shaped had fallen on the other side of the hill. They reached the top just as Purple Tutu and Pink Tutu came up the other side. And sure enough, there was their brush.

It was a very nice hill and a sunny day, so they spent it grooming each other with the brush and enjoying the outdoors. When the sun started going down, Pink Tutu carried them back up to their floating city and they went to bed. Purple Tutu was careful not to leave the brush on the windowsill anymore.

That story pretty much carried us through, at least in terms of Daddy being an acceptable bedtime substitute for Mama. The stuffy nose kept me in their for another hour, but all in all, a good night’s work.