All About Olivia

It was almost a year ago now that Beatrice first fell in love with the cartoon pig Olivia.  As part of our Christmas activity advent calender I took Beatrice to a bookstore and told her she could pick out any Christmas book she wanted.  She picked Olivia Claus (in which Olivia loses her beloved stuffed toy on Christmas Eve and imagines herself as a Santa who delivers missing toys to the children who lost them).  After reading it to her at least a hundred times, I bought a second Olivia book just so I could have something new to read. 

Flash forward to today and we have about a dozen Olivia books, from Olivia Plants a Garden to Olivia Leads a Parade.  I haven't bought her any Olivia toys* (yet) but she does have a set of Olivia temporary tattoos.  And of course, after having been vigilantly anti-TV for the first three years of Beatrice's life, I relented and downloaded two seasons of the "Olivia" cartoon show. 

The arc of every Olivia story is the same: Olivia encounters some problem in real life; she retreats into her imagination to picture some far-out solution; she applies a version of that solution to real life and it saves the day.  Almost all the problems are external (ie., a freak sunny day ruins her chances to win a snowman-building contest) and there's almost no interpersonal conflict between any of the characters.

As I've mentioned on this blog before, Beatrice insists on being called Olivia and even renamed all of her relatives, friends, and pets after their Olivia counterparts.  She quotes long passages from the books and television episodes and "Olivia" is one of only a few words she can sight-read.

This picture always makes me laugh.

So anyway, I was thinking about the "messages" of Olivia and whether or not they were good ones when it occurred to me that Olivia's character is pretty much non-stop preschool wish fulfillment.  Most characters in cartoons have some flaw (a smart but nerdy teacher's pet, a nice but dumb sidekick) but Olivia is just an entirely perfect girl.  She's good at every single thing she tries, from mountain climbing to turkey calling (really).  She's the smartest kid in her class but also the best liked and most popular; she can be sort of bossy and a know-it-all but whenever she gives her friends advice they immediately thank her and do what she suggests.  She's generous with her brothers, obedient to authority figures, and never gets in trouble.  Her parents and teacher are sometimes mildly exasperated with her but overall she's adored by every child and adult she knows.

This was amusingly confirmed the other day when Beatrice said, unprompted, "I'm Olivia.  I'm smart and funny and nice and good and Mr. Richard likes me and everyone likes me."  Who doesn't want that?

Needless to say, she's already decided to be Olivia for Halloween - luckily there's a cute store-bought costume already available so that makes my job easy.  She also wants an Olivia party for her birthday and (of course) I already have some ideas for that, too.

* One nice thing about Olivia is that there are only a few licensed toys that are only available online so at least you aren't bombarded with them at every store.