L . . I . . L . . Y!

I've been working with Lil on spelling her name for quite a while now. A few weeks ago she recited her ABC's completely unassisted, so I thought the name was the next logical step. I soon realized two major flaws in my plan, however. First, the letter "L" is one of two that she still can't pronounce correctly ("R" is the other). And while I suspect this is normal, it hurts her because it's 50% of her name. The second flaw is that when asked to identify the letters, one of her most common mistakes is confusing "I" and "Y". Geez, so much for giving her an easy-to-spell 4-letter name, eh? Well we kept practicing and practicing, at the end foregoing the mid-word split ("L I" . . "L Y") because I thought it might be confusing her, and we went for the whole thing. Well this morning she's got it, consistently knocking it out of the park, and she's sooo proud of herself! She likes to point to the big painted letters on her wall when she does it, grinning from ear to ear and clapping wildly for herself when she gets it right. "I spell (pronounced speoww) my name!", she yells. Now that she's got that mastered, our next conquest will be counting to ten in Spanish. Right now she can do "uno, dos, tres" unprompted, but we still have to walk her through 4-10. Nueve, for 9, still needs a little bit of individual attention, though. Her current pronunciation resembles the chorus to her new favorite song . . "A bay bay".