It all started with a pickle.

No, really. A month or so ago, during holidays with the grandparents, Olive didn't want to have what the rest of the family was having. I don't even remember what we all were eating, only that Olive wanted nothing to do with it. Luckily for her, there was a jar of pickles on the table, courtesy of Olive's step-great-grandmother, which she really enjoyed. We all laughed at it, and when it was time to go home, they sent along a spare jar of pickles from the same source.

Some time later, we were all again eating supper, and again, Olive didn't want anything. This time, however, she suggested her own alternative: pickles. "They're very yummy," she told us, "but a little bit sour." We could hardly refuse the request under those circumstances!

I have to divert the story here for a minute to explain about the current goodnight routine. It's been ages since Olive's let me sing to her; she decided that she was too big for that probably a year ago now. Instead, for the last several months, the routine is that after we've put away the toys, finished the books, brushed the teeth, donned the pajamas, there's one more story as she lies in her bed in the dark. For this story, she can request to hear about anyone or anything. Some times, she'll listen to whatever story I want to tell. Other times, she immediately suggests her own topic¹. Other times, it's not so easy: I might have to propose several potential story topics before she'll accept one.

The night that she requested the pickle was one for which I had to offer several suggestions. To be honest, I was getting a little bit sick of needing to keep up the spontaneous creativity, so I made what I thought was an unserious suggestion, just for the silliness of it: I would tell her the story of the girl who ate something so sour that she turned inside-out.

I should have known better, as she immediately demanded that one.

I figured it would be safe to crib Roald Dahl, who she hadn't previously encountered. The story goes like this:

Once upon a time there was a girl named Veronica Crumb. She got a special opportunity to visit the candy factory². On this visit, the factory boss told her: "There are some things here that you can just eat as much as you want. Enjoy! But there are other things here that you should not eat. I will tell you when they are. Do not eat them!"

They went and visited some of the factory parts of the first kind, and Veronica got to eat lots of yummy things. But then, they got to a part of the factory where the things were not good to eat. The factory boss told Veronica: "Do not eat anything here. It is not good for you!"

The problem was that the candy in this part of the factory looked really good, and it smelled really really good. So Veronica thought, "I'll just take this little one here. That won't be a problem!" And she put it in her mouth.

But it turns out that this candy wasn't finished yet, so it was really, really, sour. So first her mouth went blep³... but then it just kept going! And in the end, she ended up turned entirely inside out.

After that, it was a big mess: they had to stop the factory tour, and get the ambulance to take Veronica to the hospital, and the doctors had to work a long time to put her right-side out again. She did not like it. Still, she was ok in the end. Goodnight⁴!

Since then, the story of Veronica Crumb has become something of a favorite at bedtime; Olive has requested her story by name several times.

In other current events, Olive is finally at an age where she can enjoy movies; we'll often play one on dreary winter weekends. The first full-length feature she got into was Fantasia (1941), but last weekend was a first in that she saw and enjoyed a film which is not 100% dramatic music: Cars (2006).

Today, we discovered that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) is rated G; given Olive's recent interest in the topic, we decided to watch it together. While that rating is entirely appropriate, it was kind of funny to see how well its structure mirrors that of a classic horror film: a pentad of peers goes into a strange and mysterious place, and one by one, they're taken out.

Olive loved it. She continuously counted the characters down through the film, illustrating on her fingers: "There were five! Then the first one went in the tube in the chocolate river, then the third⁵ turned into a blueberry. Now there are three!"

The thing is, this is the most math I have ever seen from her, and I'm really proud that she's developing an intuition for at least hand-sized subtraction. She's known the number sequence through at least 20 for ages, and she can pretty reliably read digits below 5, but this countdown today was the first time we've seen her really using the concept for something practical. To be honest, she was a little wild-eyed about it also.

It is rare, and I think very special, to be able to watch a child make a conceptual breakthrough, particularly to see them understanding as it happens that it's a conceptual breakthrough. That the actual mechanism of the breakthrough involved watching a horror-shaped film together is just the icing on the cake.

The only disappointment at all today, from Olive's perspective, is that somehow the movie excluded Veronica Crumb. I told her that she wasn't in this movie, but really, this kind of thing happens all the time, so she must have just gone to a different factory.