Piper is pretty proud of learning to write her name. It’s taken a tough six months of preschool. I wrote about how we almost changed her name just to avoid the name writing pressure in “A Piper by Any Other Name.” Today, she’s a name writing rockstar. She labels everything she can with her mark. Tonight at dinner, on the back of several sushi ordering sheets, she moved on to more challenging name writing.

“Mom, how do you spell ‘mom’?”

“M-O-M.”

Piper wrote W-O-W.

“Oops,” I said. “Those look like “W’s.” You wrote ‘Wow.”

“Well, that’s cool,” Piper said. I agreed. Then she wrote M-O-M.

“Do you have another name, Mom?”

“I do. It’s Melissa.”

“Whoa. How do you spell that?”

“M-E-L-”

“Slow down, please. I only have one hand.” I bit my tongue not to point out that in fact a Piper has two. She wrote M-E-L.

“Okay. What’s next?”

“I-”

“Like the ‘I’ in my name?” Piper asked.

“Yes. Same ‘I.”

“What’s next?”

“S-S-A”

“Oops. I wrote 5s instead of ‘S’.” This made Piper giggle. Combining letters and numbers is hilarious business.

“That’s okay. You can just write over the 5s. They’re pretty close to ‘S.'”

“It’s too much trouble,” Piper said. “You’ll just have to spell your name with 5s.”

That makes sense. Like mother, like daughter.