Alphabetastic

So... meet my niece Zoe. She will be three this summer. Don't let that big grin and excited expression fool you. She's actually often happier and MORE excited than she looks in this picture. At least that's been my experience. Jill, if I'm wrong, I apologize but it's my blog so na na na.

Oh, how my niece loves her letters and numbers. She loves to count to herself and recite her alphabet. She enjoys pointing out letters when she sees them and will do so in restaurants, in the elevator, in the car as we pass letters on the road (you know, letters as part of signs or buildings. Not like a big letter "Z" standing on the side of the road waving at people. Cause Cleveland isn't really the type of place where letters stand on the side of the road waiting to be identified by a 2 year old child in the back of a Jeep Compass. Probably cause it's too cold to stand out there that long.) Sometimes she lays in her crib when she wakes up and recites the alphabet to herself. Sometimes she just counts to herself. The other day, she counted down from ten to one. Let me just brag on that for a second. Oh, shoot, did I forget to mention that she is a genius and quite mentally gifted? My bad.

Last time I was home, she had picked up this habit of imitating her mother answering the phone. She would, sometimes at random and sometimes when prompted by her Cool Aunt Sheri who was making sport out of annoying her sister, inquire as though having just picked up the phone, "Hello?" And then a beat. And then "HIIIII!" with a giant grin across her face. Like super giant. Like THRILLED to be saying hello. Which was charming and sweet enough on it's own. But for some reason, she associated this greeting with her then favorite letter of the alphabet. So after the "Hello? Hiiiii" exchange, she would exclaim (in this almost demonic voice which was obviously her imitating one of her talking toys) "THE LETTER D". The first time she did this, Cool Aunt Sheri almost passed out from laughing and crying at the same time. Little did I know, this was merely an appetizer for the next trip home.

I came home last week ready to continue playing the "Hello? Hi" game only to discover we had moved on. I was quite sad. She no longer took the bait. She ignored me completely. (Not unusual, you understand, but still sad.) But my sister said she had a new letter catch phrase. Not ten minutes later, she came over to my sister dragging a huge case of lego-adjacent (they serve the same purpose as legos, but Cool Aunt Sheri didn't drop the money for the real thing...) pieces. She asked my sister for a letter "W". My sister took four long straight lego-like pieces out and formed a letter "W". Zoe, overwhelmed with delight, took the "W" out of my sister's hand and held it, triumphant, over her head with both hands. You've never seen anyone so excited about or proud of a letter "W" before. And she threw her head back, presumably to admire it from below, and yelled out (typing this SO won't do it justice, but I'll do my best) "Waaaaaaaiiiiit aaaa MINUTE! It's the letter 'W'."

I pretty much fell off my chair. I was laughing so hard I had to simultaneously go fetal, wipe my eyes and cross my legs to keep from peeing. It wasn't so much the words as the inflection and the delight in her voice. If I didn't know better, I would think Ed McMahon had snuck into her room at night to teach her how to best introduce a living legend to an audience. The long drawn out "Waaaiiiiit" followed by the succinct "a MINUTE!" And topped off with the fanfare of the introduction of the fantastic letter "W"... she killed me. It took me ten minutes to recover. But it only got better.

After taking a victory lap with her letter "W", grinning like a five time gold-medal winner, she brought the "W" back down to her eye level and turned it upside down. And then, again, "Waaaaaaiiiiiiiiit a MINUTE! It's the letter 'M'." Oh god. I was dying. I couldn't control myself. Cause it was the letter "W" and then it became the letter "M" and that is just a phenomenon of nature. I tried to get her to turn it sideways and say that it was the letter "Sigma" but she seems to not enjoy the Greek alphabet as much as the English. But I trust she will in time.

Now, the interesting thing is that although she also enjoyed the letter "K" which my family members did a valiant job trying to construct with the lego-ish materials but ultimately failed at, no other letters would result in the level of delight that "W" and "M" inspired. I tried to do the letter "I" and the letter "U". (Now that I think about it, I probably could have really dazzled her with an "S" but I didn't have that inspiration until just now. Jill, give it a shot and let me know how it goes.)

I wonder if that's because the letter "W" is a fun word to say and the letter "M" is a fun noise. Whatever the reason, we celebrated these two exciting letters every day I was home at least once. I can't wait until the next time I see her. She'll probably be spelling the Gettysburg Address letter by letter and be able to balance my checkbook. Someone needs to do it. And God knows it shouldn't be me!

And in case you are wondering, it's not that I gave MYSELF the nickname Cool Aunt Sheri. It's just that I knew when she was born that this is what she will want to call me one day, so I just began the process early to let the rest of the family get used to it. Adults take longer to learn than children, you know?