Girl Scout My Little Pony Fun Patch and Watch Party, Because Teenagers are Still Babies

 

We have come a LONG way from that one time, 13 years ago, that I spent an entire day trying to distract my four-year-old away from her desire to just watch a freaking My Little Pony cartoon, for pete's sake.

I literally cannot make it any clearer to you that I have no chill, and have never had even the slightest amount of chill, than by having you read that blog post.

Or possibly it just illustrates the fact that I spoil the snot out of Syd, because not only did she watch so much Land before Time at that exact age that I eventually had to start cutting her off ONLY because she started talking like Ducky all the time and I was worried she'd need speech therapy, but also, literally yesterday, she and I played a game where I started reading the plot summaries of a random Land before Time movie, and she'd stop me when she remembered the rest of the plot.

I tell you what, those eggnappers were bad news!!!

And we have since seen every single episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and we have the soundtracks as part of our Spotify rotation, AND we watched the movie--in an actual theater!

My kids were clearly not the only ones who were My Little Pony superfans, because when this limited edition fun patch for the most recent Netflix movie came out, several of my Girl Scouts wanted one. Nostalgia is a happy emotion, and I love seeing kids who aren't too cool for their childhood pleasures!

The suggested activities for earning the fun patch are of course WAY too babyish for teenagers, so we satisfied ourselves by watching that My Little Pony movie (yes to a whole month of Netflix!!!), and engaging in a few My Little Pony-adjacent activities.

Here are some of those My Little Pony-adjacent activities, all quite suitable for the nostalgic teenager:

• Perler beads. Really, any fan art will do, but Perler beads are very suitable for teenagers, and many of them like fiddly little activities they can do with their hands while chatting. I also highly recommend shrink plastic, either printed with images you've grabbed off Google that they can color, or photocopied with graphics from the billion My Little Pony coloring books, activity books, and early reader books at the thrift store.
• stickers and temporary tattoos. Draw your own (have you heard the gospel of water-slide paper?!?) or print graphics like these cutie marks.
  
• DIY plushies. This is way too much work to do with a group of kids, but it would also be a good project to hand-sew in felt and embroidery floss, if you had a teenager or two who wanted to learn that skill.
• party food. Ignore the fact that this blog post with all the awesome party food is for a My Little Pony party for a THREE-YEAR-OLD. Ahem. The beauty of having a retro MLP party with teenagers is that THEY can make all the food! Everybody can sign up to bring something, or you can choose all the recipes and buy all the ingredients ahead of time, and let making the food be one of the activities.
• cake cones. One year, Syd had a fairy tale party complete with a castle cake that she decorated herself. Bizarrely, the most popular parts of this castle cake were the waffle and sugar cones she'd coated in canned frosting. The kids mowed down those frosted cones--they might even have pulled the leftovers out of the pantry and frosted and eaten them, too! It was a sleepover that I'm pretty sure nobody slept at. So I think these My Little Pony-themed cones would be pretty popular to make and eat!
• upcycled toys. It would be super cute to have the kids bring some old MLP toys they wouldn't mind parting with, then letting them upcycle them into fun, new creations. Here's an easy snow globe to start with!

Because one of the greatest lessons that you can teach a teenager is how to throw an awesome retro party!

A Fight with Fluttershy, or, How to Sneak Interest-Led Preschool Reading, Writing, and Art into Your Small Child's Media Obsession

Somehow, Will has become obsessed with My Little Pony, without any actual exposure to the cartoon.

Well...I do have a couple of old-school My Little Pony figures from my own childhood that the kids play with, but we all refer to these as "baby horses." I dunno--do the ponies whisper into their brains, "We are really called My Little Pony. Ask your mommy to let you watch our cartoon"? At school, the kids spend half the day running around on the playground--do they intersperse soccer and animal doctor and who can slide down the slide the fastest with "Hey, did you catch yesterday's My Little Pony? Awesome!" Was she somehow exposed to My Little Pony radiation at the video rental place that has affected her on a cellular level?

Whatever the societal ills that have led us to this juncture, Will woke up this morning wanting to draw "a My Little Pony with wings." Okay... I sit her down with paper and markers, she draws for about a second, then scribbles in fury all over her page and freaks out in frustration because her picture doesn't look like the picture in her head. I'm not exactly happy with this, because her unhappiness with her own product makes me wonder if she's been too exposed lately to adult versions of drawing, or adult models of how to create a particular art product.

So I sit down with Will and attempt to talk her through what she wants to create--"Okay, start with a head--good. Now draw a body attached to the head." That lasts for maybe two seconds, with hysterical tears to follow. We're moving, now, progressively down my levels of preferences for how I'd like her to do her art.

First preference: the child creates her own art.

Second preference: an adult talks the child through the creation of the art she wants, while keeping the art materials, and thus the control, entirely in the child's hands.

Third preference: the adult provides the child with a model to copy to create the particular image she desires. So we go together to the Internet and do a Google image search for "My Little Pony," printing off a colorful picture of a candy-bright, chunky-hoofed horse-like critter for Willow to copy. This actually gets her through the creation of one entire picture, when then, unfortunately, is scribbled over and torn up and thrown on the floor in a screaming fury that then requires the said four-year-old to sit in my lap, weeping, for nearly ten minutes. Clearly, we're down to the last resort here.

Fourth preference: I print off some coloring pages from the Internet. My derision for coloring books is manifold--there is little scope for imagination in working with someone else's version of a scene, it models "how to do" a piece of art that my kids tend to want to imitate instead of doing their own far more creative visions, its filling-in-the-blanks doesn't reinforce the kind of manual arts skills I think they should be practicing, etc. However, on the plus side, it finally gives Will an acceptable (to her) My Little Pony picture to immerse herself in, and it's an acceptable way, at least, for her to follow her interest in My Little Pony. 

Speaking of high horses:I'm a tricky mama, however, and now my morning is centered around not cooking or cleaning (yay!), but channeling this interest into an activity equally satisfying for Will, but more in tune with my desire that she do something creative and educational. While the kids colored on these ridiculous cartoon Pony pages, I printed off a few horse coloring pages from the Internet and interspersed them in with the others. Here's Syd's horse:

  

I love the red devil eyes and the fiery red hooves Syd graced her horse with.

Then, while the kids were working on a couple of horse coloring pages, I sewed together a couple of blank books (I have got to remember to put aside a sewing machine needle or two just for sewing paper--I can't believe that I was so immersed in my own little mission that I sewed the books together with the nearly new ballpoint needle that was already in the machine). 

I sat down next to Will at the table and, when she was finished with her horse picture, I said, sweet and innocent as candy, "Here's a special blank book I just made for you. Do you want to tell me a horse story for it?" And Will proceeded to dictate a twenty-minute-long narrative about a unicorn named Chicka-dee-dee who gets a pet bird, meets a herd of unicorns, battles two dinosaurs, falls into the ocean, and disappears herself onto an airplane. Then she illustrated it:

 

Here's the dictation Syd gave me for her own book, and her illustration:

 

Does the phrase "Daddy's little girl" have any significance here?

So, yeah, I'm a manipulative parent who will use my so-far greater intelligence as mere deviousness in order to trick my child away from a pleasure she embraces and toward what I want. Well, if you can't manipulate your children, then who can you legally manipulate?