When Annalie was a newborn, I realized that I could spell her name to the tune of the old Nestle’s Quik commercial (I looked for a video online but couldn’t find one):

A-n-n-a-l-i-e
That’s how you spell Annalie
Graaaaaaahn-berg!

We’d sing that to her and sort of growl the last line, which made her laugh every time. She knew the letter A and started pointing it out to us around 18 months old. Then she started recognizing her name. We’d try to trick her by asking her if other words were her name, but she was rarely fooled.

We assumed that writing her name would soon follow. She was 28 months old the first time she wrote a capital letter A without any prompting on our parts. She started drawing smiley faces at 29 months, and added stick arms and legs to her smiley faces a month after that, creating those weird bodiless people that all kids seem to draw. But A was the only letter she was interested in writing, thank you very much.

When one of us was sitting at the table with her while she colored, she loved to ask us to write for her—Annalie, Mama, Daddy, Grandma, Grandpa, and Gabby were all frequent requests—but she stubbornly resisted all our attempts to interest her in writing other letters. So we didn’t push. She wasn’t even three, after all.

Somewhere along the line, she picked up on the idea that the lowercase letter i can look like a balloon, if you draw the dot as a circle. And Annalie loves balloons. So she added balloony i’s to her repertoire. Next came a five-pronged E, because according to Annalie “it needs more than three!” Then came L, though I am not sure how she figured that one out. (Troy, did you show her that one? Mom, did you?)

And that’s where things stayed for a long time. Annalie knew two-thirds of the letters in her name, though she rarely wrote them in order without being asked to do so. Occasionally I would try to show her how to draw N, and she usually ignored me. Sometimes she got annoyed, and I would back off, because I’m that way myself. If I don’t want to do something, I do not want to do it, and would you just drop it please and stop bothering me now?

Ever since Annalie first started writing A’s, I’ve been having her sign birthday cards and thank-you notes with at least one letter, and maybe a little picture if she feels like drawing. As she has learned more letters in her name, she’s written more of them in her signature. So before we went to Rachel & Jeff’s wedding yesterday (more coming about that later), I asked her if she wanted to sign her name in their card.

“Oh, yes I do!” she cheerfully answered, and wrote a careful A before asking, “What’s the next letter again?” Mildly surprised, I showed her how to write an N, and she attempted to copy it. When she finished, she chuckled and said, “Oh! That’s not very good. But that’s OK, I can try again.” And she did a little better on the second N. She fumbled a bit with the remaining letters, but when she was done, Annalie had written her name all by herself for the first time.