The Overrated Letter L

My son, Dusty, was born articulate. Honestly, I’m not being an insufferably proud mom or if I am it’s still true. He’s a little fat head. He can’t help himself he’s the five year old village elder. He loves language and therefore tries to make his sentences as long and winded as possible. The more syllables a word has the more excited he becomes. I’m not sure whether this is cruel or not, but I have made a point of not correcting his pronunciation or when he uses a word incorrectly. Every L would come out as a W and more often than not Tony and I just started pronouncing our L’s like W’s as well, for the sake of family solidarity. With two of his best friends being Lilly and Wiley it was really amusing. Listening to Dusty talk was like hearing Elmer Fudd expwain the theowy of wewativity. Slowly I noticed that Dusty was becoming aware of his little speech impediment. I overheard him explaining to both Lilly and Wiley that he has trouble with his L’s and that is why he doesn’t say their names pwopewy. So, about a week ago Dusty looked up from watching some brain eating Zombie on Scooby Doo, paused the DVD and announced that he can now say the letter L. He took his sweet time, put his tongue to the roof of his mouth and said LLLego….LLLLLillly……..LLLLolllipop. Tony and I smiled and told him how proud we were of him. He unpaused the DVD and when we were sure he was back in the land of Scooby we put our heads down on the kitchen table and cried. Who would do this to our child? Of course, we later learned that one of his teachers had taught him and I suppose that is what teachers are supposed to do. Dusty may have been ready, but we weren’t. I am proud at his determintion. He is just going at those L’s with gusto. Nothing can stop him now. Every once in a while he gets tired and falls back into his W ways. I cherish those sentences, knowing that progress can’t be stopped.