My LO is 18 months old and has been picking up words like crazy lately. Our nanny is wonderful and very proud of LO and does a great job fostering her language development.

But I could use a sanity check on one thing that kind of came to a head this morning--and I don't know if I'm being weirdly sensitive on this particular topic.

About a month or so ago, when LO was only 17 months, I came home from work and the nanny wanted to show me a new "trick" she had taught her. She said "what is Mommy's name?" and then LO proudly said a garbled version of my name. My heart sunk as it felt so wrong for her to call me by my name, and I immediately told the nanny that I didn't want my toddler to get confused, and that I wanted to simply be "Mommy" to her. I know she couldn't understand the distinction between what she should call me, "Mommy," and my given legal name, and that it seemed like it was WAY too early to be introducing that kind of information to her when all she needed was a simple label for me, one she already had - "Mommy."

The nanny seemed very confused, surprised, and almost hurt by my reaction, and said she thought it was important for the (17 month old!!!) to know my name in case she was ever lost and someone asked her who her mommy was. I told her that she is way, way too young for that, and on the off chance that she would remember to say my super garbled (and mis-pronounced anyway--the nanny doesn't pronounce my very simple, common name correctly...annoyingly) name, it would almost certainly not really help, as we live in a big city and my name is common (and it is my middle name anyway). In any case, she won't be getting lost at 17 months if we do our jobs right, so it seemed a weird red herring response to my request that she not teach my baby to call me by my first name.

I never heard my LO use my name again (it had to be kind of coaxed out of her that one occasion the nanny had her say it in front of me).

Fast forward to this morning, a month or so later, and my toddler started saying my name and pointing to me as I left for work. It felt like nails on a chalkboard to me - I just want her to call me "Mommy!" Is that weird?

I confronted the nanny and she said she had never said my name to her again, and that LO must just have remembered it from a month+ ago. But while I was getting ready about 30 minutes earlier I had overheard the nanny asking LO what her name was, and then what Mommy's name was, and saying my first name. I didn't say anything until LO started saying it to me over and over as I was leaving, when it hit home how wrong it felt to be called by my first name.

Mostly, I'm wondering if I'm crazy. Would it bother you if your childcare provider taught your toddler your first name?