I cracked up, cause I had NO CLUE what she was referring to. She had to point out the post.

Susan, if she can say the sounds the right way sometimes, then it sounds like waiting for the next evaluation is a good idea.

I was in speech therapy for L's and S's elementary school. The exercise I remember is "Little Lucy loves lemon lollipops." I still don't do well on "She sells sea shells on the seashore," which is the S one I remember. Part of my problem with L's is that I wasn't making them correctly; I was putting my tongue on my teeth rather than on the pallet.

Yeah, Mallory doesn't do R or L correctly either, which is a bummer given his name. As far as he and his classmates are concerned, he's Mau-wee. Or Maui, I guess. "Lefligelator" is my current favorite Mallish word (that would be refrigerator), although "ocelot" (which he says correctly) is pretty cute.

He also transposes T and C in some words: Tookie and cassel, although he says car and castle and tr- words fine.

I despair of ever getting the kid potty trained, though.

Talking to DH again--apparently the S sounds are more of an issue than the L's and R's. She's got a fairly strong lisp, with her S sounds somewhere between a Z and a TH. Which DH also did as a child.

For the L sound, for right now, if she says a word with L and she says it wrong, just repeat it back. Like, if she says "Gramma lives in Awabama" say something like "That's right! She lives in Alabama."

This could be a good idea, but with the caveat that you don't then ask her to repeat "Alabama." (If she can say in the right way, then she'll get to saying in consistently eventually. If she can't, then that's a sure-fire way to create a frustrated kid who decides that it's too much hassle to use words with L sounds. And, lots of words have L sounds.)

(When I was in elementary school, a well-meaning but ill-informed teacher would say, "Say 'Yessss,' Hillary," whenever I answered a question with "Yeth." And I couldn't do it. I knew I couldn't, and I didn't want to try and fail in front of her. So I switched to "Yeah," but she told me that "Yeah" was rude, and that I shouldn't use it when talking to adults. So I just stopped answering questions in that class.)

A boy I used to babysit would call me "Hiwwy" when he was about 2. That slowly transitioned into "Hirry" and then "Hirrawy" and then "Hirrary." He didn't consistently say "Hillary" properly until he was about 4. I've seen this happen with a lot of kids -- the L and R sounds eventually work themselves out.

Hil, you're right. Mom said, just repeat the world correctly and then leave it. The idea is that Annabel will pick up the correct pronounciation.

Mostly what she said, is don't worry about this too much, right now. A lot can happen in 6 months and Annabel is still young.

It's funny, Annabel didn't say her name until she got to a point where she could pronounce it correctly, but other kids tend to start with "A'bel" then work their way through "Abbabel" before getting to Annabel. The middle pronunciation led a lot of parents of two-year-olds to think the little girl in their kids' class with the thick brown hair was named Abigail.

And to break in with MEME news--

I'm starting to see definition in my arms! Not a lot, just a little when I do a bicep curl. But still change and exercises I'm doing are getting easier.