We’ve already established that Olivia likes to know the names of all of the characters in her books, including those whom the author does not identify. The subject came up again on Monday night as we read Down on the Farm with Grover.
At the end of the book, a large group of Sesame Streeters come with Grover to his uncle’s farm to help with the harvest. Olivia knows who most of these characters are, but on Monday night she pointed to one of them and said “Who’s that?”
This time, I knew the answer. “That’s Roosevelt Franklin,” I said, pleased to be one step ahead of my daughter.
“No!” she said, which totally took me aback. What do you mean, “no”? I know who my Muppets are, dammit!
We argued about this for a minute or two, at which point I used the master debate tactic of “Daddy says it’s time to get into bed and go night-night”, which worked better than my answer to her identity question went. After lights out, I went downstairs and told the story to Tiffany.
“Oh,” Tiffany said. “She asked me that question last night. I didn’t know what his name was, so we picked a name for him. We decided his name was Sammy.”
Well, at least that explains why she didn’t like my name for the character. I think the lesson here is that the answer is always “Go ask Mommy”. I feel confident that this will serve me well in other situations, too. For as long as I can get away with it, anyway.
The coda to the story is that Tiffany read this book to Olivia last night. The name question came up again, but this time Tiffany informed Olivia that Daddy had done some research and now we knew that the character’s name really was Roosevelt Franklin. Not in Olivia’s world, he’s not – she insisted on Sammy. Eventually, a compromise was reached. The character’s name is now officially Sammy Roosevelt Franklin. I’ll be informing the Children’s Television Workshop later today.
Ha! My middle daughter Catalina is the same age as your Olivia I think. She’ll be 4 in March.
She does the same thing but only with animals. She’s very into animals and will pretend to pick up, talk to, and pet certain favorite animals on certain pages then carefully put them back in their spots on the printed page. God forbid I turn the page before she puts one of the animals back. That’s a major crisis and we need to go back and find the right page so that her animals can be “back with their friends”.
Her current favorite book by far is “Wild About Books” which is a very cool book about a bookmobile that gets lost at the zoo and all the animals learn to read:
http://www.amazon.com/About-Excellence-Childrens-Literature-Awards/dp/037582538X/