Today's Show Brought to You by the Letter...Is That a 3?

Kate has really mastered her letters. She, like her mama, likes to write in all capital letters. If she keeps that up forging letters to school from mom will be much easier than it was for me. I think that's kind of a shame; there was real fun in the mastery of it. Anyway, the thing she does now that's of great interest is this: she writes backwards. Perfectly. For a second I feared she was dyslectic, but no, her letters are all consistently backwards. Often she writes from right to left, too. Always she writes with her left hand.

I asked Kate why she wrote everything backwards. She said simply "because I want to!". I tried to explain to her, in my crunchy liberal mama fashion, not wanting to crush her spirit (that's what school is for) that writing is for communication and if she writes everything backwards people won't know what she's talking about. Except for that midget from Twin Peaks and the little kid from The Shining. She pointed out that I knew what she'd written and I had to concede defeat, there. She'd written "KATE" in roughly 36-size font, but I could tell she wasn't going to be swayed by any argument.

We're more fascinated than worried. I asked her teacher if it was common and she just shrugged it off. "She'll stop eventually" she predicted. I left vaguely dismayed by her teacher's failure to seem curious about what would cause a person to do that. Is she just so worn out by her task to train so many youngsters to write the proper way that there's no time for musings regarding the inner workings of the human brain?

Kate, incidentally, has always favored her left hand. Everything I read said you really can't be sure until the child begins to write, but with her, she never seemed to doubt it was her dominate side. I'll have to read up on the backwards thing. I have seen her execute perfect forward-facing letters as well, so I believe her when she says she's doing it because she wants to. Rebel.

And now for some Cute from this morning.