There she was, sitting in the bathtub with all those little foam letters and numbers floating around her. I waited impatiently for her to get some splashing in before saying, "OK, let's rinse." But she picked up a green letter first and asked, several times before I could even answer, "Wassat? Wassat? Wassat?"

"That's a 'Q'," I said. "Q is for a queen and quiet quails."

She played some more, mostly filling a bucket with water then dumping it out over and over again while a lonely train of magnetic turtles and several rubber duckies rolled in her wake. Then she picked up the Q again, said "Wassat?", and before I could answer, answered herself.

"Q."

"That's right!" I screeched, wide-eyed and grinning. How amazing that she had picked that up so quickly. Then I thought about it: Many of the books I read to Lillia each night - and whenever she catches me in a position where my lap is available - are ABC books. Maybe she picked up on some other letters.

She already points at the register at the grocery store and says "Numbers, mommy. Numbers." And when she was in the ER for her asthma attack, she pointed at the monitor and said "Lillia's numbers." She's also recognized and pointed out A and I and the number 8 on several occasions. Like the time we were at a stop light next to a gas station where pump number 8 faced the street. This is no dummy we're dealing with.

So I picked up the letters, one by one, and asked her what they were. A. B. C. D. She got through the first four. She missed a few, then G. I, of course. J. K. L. All but 10. I sat crouched next to the tub, giggling at the strangeness of this little bitty 19-month-old saying "R."

And the next bath night, I tried a different tactic. "Where's the E?" I asked. She looked around. Then pointed. AT THE E. She got about five more than the first night. And at the grocery store that weekend, looking at a sale balloon: "L mommy. L mommy."

She'll point at the letters in her books and say what they are, or ask "Wassat?" about the ones she can't quite remember. When I answer, she always looks at me as though she would like further information regarding this so-called M or the infamous T. As we leave the house, she points at the "For Sale" sign in front of our house. "Letters and numbers," she says. When we're driving around town, she shouts the names of letters from the backseat as we pass by street signs and storefronts. It's like she's finally got confirmation that those are, in fact, the names of these figures, and wants everyone to know that she is fully aware.

Now, if we could just get her to stop peeing on the floor...