i'd like to buy a vowel

it's amazing what a little over two months of kindergarten will do for a kid.  where we've observed liam's largest gains has been in his writing.  he's never been a big fan of anything that requires fine motor skills, probably because he's never had great fine motor skills.  (one of those chicken-and-the-egg scenarios, i suppose.)  while susanna could sit at the table and draw for two hours straight, liam's never been inclined to sit still with a marker or crayon in his hand.  until now.  he's learned how to form all of his uppercase and lowercase letters, and loves to combine them into messages for us, or in labels on his pictures, or on a scoreboard to represent his imaginary basketball games he makes up in his head.

and a byproduct of all this writing is a newfound interest in spelling.  he'll often flip around letters ("beach" might look like "becah", and "light" might look like "lihgt") and will sometimes omit one completely, but he's getting a pretty good handle on how to create words. 

so while he was writing a short book report the other day for homework, he misspelled the word "him" by forgetting the "i" in the middle.  i launched into a quick lesson on vowels, and how every word in the english language requires a vowel.  (i figured that the 19 weird words in scrabble that do not might be a topic for another day.)

tonight, the four of us were in the car, and out of the blue, liam says, "i have a friend who does not have a vowel in his name."

(by the way, i have no idea why he's thinking about vowels on a saturday afternoon after spending four hours playing outside and on his way to a family party.  the kid is funny.)

"i'm not so sure about that," i said.  "remember that every word has to have at least one vowel."

"but i know someone who doesn't have a vowel!" he insisted.

he's probably talking about his friend ty, i thought.  i had only listed out a, e, i, o, and u in my earlier lesson; i hadn't expected to have to explain how that pesky "y" sometimes fits the bill as well.  so the teacher in me geared up for another grammar lesson.  "well, there's one letter that's kind of funny that we didn't talk about earlier.  it's the letter 'y'," i began.

he interrupted me.  "oh, his name doesn't have a 'y' in it.  and it doesn't have a vowel."

"honey, no matter what, i promise you that every name you've ever heard of has a vowel in it.  who are you talking about?"

"D.J."