Wow, Áine, what a thrill to hear that your Caty wants to follow in your musical footsteps!

I understand people's reluctance to start her off with steel strings because of the pre-callus pain (not to mention the danger to a young playmate's eyes when the strings break!), but I dunno.... when I was a kid, I was really "put off" by nylon strings. My fingers would slip off them, and I knew that the noise they made when I strummed wasn't the same as the sound I heard those folk-guitarists of the '60s making on TV! And Áine's kid wants to "play like Mommy" so I'll betcha dollars-to-doughnuts that she wants her guitar to sound like Mommy's! Isn't there some alternative to painful-to-young-fingers steel strings and blah-sounding nylon strings? Something in between?