How an Embryo Became An Olivia

I was reading one of my favorites sites, Bottom Shelf Books, a few weeks ago and I came across this hilarious post and it inspired me to tell one of my favorite stories. Incidentally, if you are not reading Bottom Shelf, you should be, especially if you read books to small children. Let's face it, you are parodying most of those books in your head anyway, you should be able to laugh along with those doing it better.

Anyway, the post is about New Year's resolutions that popular children's book characters have made, and Olivia is included. Not everyone may be aware of the fact that our Olivia is, indeed, named after Ian Falconer's Olivia. The Olivia books follow a pig named Olivia who gets herself into all manner of sassy situations, but that is not why my daughter is her namesake.

When I was about five months pregnant, Chad and I were finally given the opportunity to find out the sex of the baby. I know you may find this shocking, but instant gratification being our thing, we jumped at the chance. I had been not so secretly hoping for a boy, Chad a girl, but since we only had a boy's name down, if this was a girl we were screwed. I know some couples say that they had a really hard time choosing names, but Chad and I were on two different planets with girls' names. I felt compelled to protect my future offspring so no compromising. So, of course, it was a girl. We decided that now that we knew that she was a real whole person and saw her suck her thumb and stuff we needed to actually, you know, purchase something that indicated that we had accepted that in four short months we would be responsible for caring for another human being. So naturally, that was books. So we cruise the B&N and start making the pile of the essential classics and I come across Olivia. Having not done the little kid lit thing in awhile, Olivia was all new to me and I knew at once it was coming home with me.

I will ignore the blatant pandering-to-me story line of a pig that insists she can paint better than Picasso, dreams of being Maria Callas, and sleeps under posters of Eleanor Roosevelt. It was when after spinning a fantastic yarn about joining the circus over summer vacation that she insists when her teacher presses her on the veracity of her story that it is true, "To the best of my recollection." That is when I became resigned to the fact that whether I liked it or not that the daughter of a lawyer and an art historian could only be an Olivia. And she is in every, single way. Though the last two Olivia books have been a little disappointing, the frenetic energy that may one day need to be medicated is all still there.

So someday my own little porcine princess will read this and know that her big, fat, pregnant mother sitting on a very tiny bench in the children's section of the Barnes and Noble put away The Velveteen Rabbit, Pooh Bear and all the gentle classics of my fantasies and purchased the only book we knew would do for our Olivia. Where The Wild Things Are. Which she has already shredded to pieces. Twice.