Lightning the Queen
Olive has recently developed a deep attachment to the movie Cars. Its sequels don't interest her much--in a few attempts, she's never made it past the first hour--but something about the original keeps her deeply fascinated. I suspect she feels a connection to the main character; in her own words, "I like to go fast!" At any rate, it's not the scenery: though she enjoys it by association, when Christina and I tried to show her photos from our own American Southwest / Route 66 roadtrip from 2015, she was only faintly interested. The fact that I drove a red Miata at the time was much more interesting to her.
As cute as that all is, the cherry on the cake is that she really doesn't appear to understand that the main character's name is in fact "Lightning McQueen". Christina's laid it out explicitly: "Mc" is a prefix that appears on some Scottish surnames, and it's not the same as "the". Olive either doesn't understand, or doesn't care: to her, that car is always "Lightning the Queen".
It seems that this is the age when Olive is beginning to develop not just an appreciation of stories, but the ability to tell her own. This has been developing for some time. Early after starting at her daycare, we developed a routine in which I'd park a short distance away and walk her in1. At one point on the route from where I like to park to her daycare, there are some thick hedges. That point also happens to be a convenient place to cross the street. Fairly early on developing this routine, Olive told me that those hedges are the Deep Dark Woods, where the Gruffalo lives; we were crossing the street so that it wouldn't get us. The first time she told me that, I thought it was just a transient comment and agreed without thinking much about it. The next day, she pointed it out again; since then, it's been a fairly frequent observation on her part as we walk past2.
The thing is, the story has been slowly growing more elaborate. About a month ago, she told me that the Gruffalo had gotten hurt: "He tried to get someone and he ran into the road and a car bonked him! He said: 'Ouch!' He needs a doctor!". Last week, she told me that he'd gone to see the Gruffalo Doctor, who gave him some medicine and told him to lie in bed and rest. "He had to rest for a long time. He's getting better, though." This story is developing very slowly, a dribble every few weeks. I'm kind of excited to hear what happens next, though; this is Olive being purely and spontaneously creative, and it's fun to see where her sense of cause and effect takes her.
A somewhat more negative recent development is a fascination with expectoration. For some reason, Olive thinks it's both appropriate and funny to spit on people and furniture. We're trying to educate her otherwise, but it appears to be an actual Phase She's Going Through, to our dismay. Hopefully it's a short one.
Put this together for her newfound fabulist abilities, and Olive has means, motive, and opportunity to lie. Still, for now at least, there doesn't appear to be any real intent to deceive. Earlier today, on the couch, Olive suddenly moved over and made a suspicious "p-tah" noise. She then announced to Christina: "I didn't spit."
"Oh?", asked Christina. "Where didn't you spit?"
Moving the cushion, Olive was happy to point out the stain: "Right here!"
The parking situation at her daycare is terrible, because when it was built, it was only intended to service children in its immediate neighborhood, who'd all be expected to walk there. Some 60 years later now, it's servicing its own neighborhood plus several new developments plus a housing area which used to be an American military barracks but has since been returned to German civilian control. Meanwhile, on the residential street where the daycare was built, all the residents have driveways with gates, but they often park on the street because it turns out to be inconvenient to exit your car to open your driveway gate. This reduces the nominally two-lane road to a single lane. Non-residents who want to drop off or pick up their children either compete for street parking, or either block someone's driveway or take a reserved parking spot for the 5 minutes that dropoff/pickup actually takes.
It's not just an observation she makes to me, either: she's pointed out the area to Christina when they walk home together, and hates to walk on that side of the street.