Pronunciation Fun?

Today, my mother asked me how to spell mañana. She had been saying it [mɪnænə], and thought the orthography was minyana. I found this both interesting and unfortunate all at the same time.

1) My mother's filter does not seem to pick up the front pure vowel [a]. I know that other English speakers have this same problem when learning Spanish.

2) My mother cannot talk. No, really, she had to do speech therapy as a child. She mispronounces everything, and this is very annoying for me. In my head, I begin to phonetically transcribe things she says.

3) After realizing why she was mispronouncing the word, I proceeded to stick my fingers in my mouth and show her the difference in tongue positions for the two vowels. She looked at me cross-eyed. I am a freak.

That's all. I found a summer job! I still miss everyone, and I was really sad when this all happened. I felt alone in my phonetics freakishness.