A Child Named Na Part 2

“Hey Na, you need to start spelling your whole name,” I said to Natalie, who immediately looked affronted.

“My name is Natalie,” she answered primly.

“Then,” I said, holding up a paper that she did at school, “write that out. Don’t just write NA and stop.”

Remember awhile back when I wrote about how Natalie was signing her name Na? Well. She still is. Her teacher is working on trying to get her to write her entire name.

It’s not going well.

And before she didn’t mind being referred to as Na. Now she’s greatly insulted.

“When you get to Kindergarten, you’ll have to write your entire name,” I explained to Natalie. “So let’s practice.”

Natalie sighed. “But I was about to play Princess!”

“You can play after,” I promised. “Let’s practice your name.”

“I can’t! I have a hole in my head!” Natalie protested. Yeah. She’s really been milking that one.

“Let’s practice spelling it once,” I said, handing her a pencil. “Then you can play.”

Natalie scowled. “Fi-neee.” She dragged out the word as she took the pencil. She bent over the paper and wrote the familiar N and A.

“Continue, Na,” I pressed.

“I AM NOT NA!”

“Then finish your name, Naomi Campbell. Geez. Thank goodness we didn’t have a phone near us or I imagine I’d have been hit in the head with it.”

Natalie bit her lower lip, ignoring my quip. “T,” she said, and wrote the letter down. “A…I…E.”

“You forgot a letter.”

“I have a hole in my head.”

“Natalie,” I said, in a warning tone.

“But I’m a woman,” Natalie pointed out. Yeah, I know. Weird. She’s been saying that lately. I think she got it from A Mermaid Tale. It’s some Barbie movie and I think Barbie talks about becoming a woman or something. So now Natalie randomly says she’s a woman. I’m used to it, which is why I didn’t even react and instructed her to continue with her name.

“I don’t like the letter L today.” Natalie tried a different tactic.

“So your name is Nataie. Sounds like a name a celebrity would give their kid.”

“My name is Natalie.” She wrote in the letter L. “There!”

I thought, hey, now she’ll write her full name.

Then she came home yesterday with this.

(Well, there WOULD be a picture but it's on my phone and my phone IS NOT TURNING ON! So basically just picture a paper with NA written across it..)

So I still have a daughter named Na.