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| Or Hussein, for that matter? Not me, although I've got no beef with the name.
Okay, I might be a little bit tired and writing a little too stream of conscious, but I just got interested in this whole name thing when I read my cousin's site. It seemed like a great opportunity to talk about myself, and ignore the fact that I'm way behind on posting news of the new addition in our house, Peter, who's almost 4 months old now.
I've always liked my name, which seems to be fairly consistent with other women with unusual names. I've never wished I had a different name. I've never adopted or accepted a nickname like "Lucy" so that other people will recognize my name and pronounce it correctly the first time they see it. I am not Lucy, no offense to other Lucys out there. I introduce myself as Lucia, and am willing to calmly correct mispronunciations among co-workers and others who I expect to have a long-term relationship with. Who am I kidding? When I accidentally answer a call from a telemarketer (very short-term relationship) who asks for "Loo-see-uh", I respond with "This is 'Loo-shuh", which almost always prompts an apology. I just want them to know that I know that they don't know me, in spite of their presumption in using my first name, which is probably fundamentally obnoxious of me at some level.
Moving on, hmm, nicknames. My family has always called me Lu, possibly Lulu or "little Lulu" when teasing, and my sister came up with Luke, which has always been my favorite, probably because it was my sister who came up with it.
I don't remember anyone really making fun of my name. Maybe I've blocked it out of my memory or something, but at any rate, it made no impression on me if it did happen. Oh, yeah, my (maiden) last name sounds like an animal, even though it's spelled very differently, so I got a lot of not-so-clever comments about that, but they were pretty much water off a duck's back.
I do remember being called "French Fry" by a kid on the school bus in elementary or middle school. He said I was tall, skinny, and pale, and had a little ketchup on top, just like a french fry. He found himself very amusing. I always practiced the "ignore bullies" tactic with him, because I'm not very quick with my tongue, and I couldn't think of an appropriately crushing reply, but ignoring him didn't seem to be much of a deterrent. I'm afraid sometimes "ignoring" is interpreted as "cowardice," which may have been accurate in my case. Not that I went home and cried over it or anything. I realized that what he thought was completely unimportant, even though I still wished I could think of something annihilating to say in response.
There you go. I have no brilliant conclusion to wrap this up. I should have gone to bed earlier, probably, since you never know when Peter's going to want to start socializing. He has a cold, currently, and his snurgling seems to prompt him to check in with Mom more frequently during the night.
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| Um, so I'm afraid we're going to have a baby soon. The OB/GYN seems to think that this one is going to come early, since I'm somewhat dilated and effaced now, at 38 weeks. I'm pretty sure I'm not ready yet, although I'm not sure I'll ever be ready, so maybe it doesn't matter. Our brilliant daughter is day-time potty trained, although she still wears a diaper to bed, and still requires/desires her blanket and pacifier in times of distress. I'm not even really sure how the night-time potty-training happens, although I suppose we'll figure it out eventually. She's sleeping fine in her big-girl bed, and she doesn't even try to climb out of it if Jerry and I aren't there to watch, although it's easy to do. She does seem to be considering giving up her nap, which isn't my preference with a new baby coming, but we'll see. She seems to miss about one nap a week, although we've all been sick with a cold for the last week, which has been great for naps. The nursery is not yet painted, so we might have to enlist help from our parents when they come to help with the baby. Hopefully not, but you never know. There is, as of today, a bed for the baby set up in our bedroom, which should work for a couple of months. I've gone into the office for the last time until after the baby arrives, unless some emergency arises that can't be handled by e-mail, and I can't think of one. No, we don't have a name yet. We're not actually making any progress on that front, either. We're sort of at an impasse. Jerry and I both have a favorite name, and both of us "like" the name the other prefers, but the names do not match, and neither of us has given up the hope that the other will "come around". So there we are. Of the Chinese middle names that we're considering, we can mostly pronounce at least half of them. We're probably closer to consensus on the middle name than the first name. I think Elise is going to like Halloween tomorrow. We have a black and red butterfly costume that's very cute. She put it on for the second time today, and is excited about the prospect of going up to people's houses and getting candy. Since we bought our own candy today, she wanted candy for dinner, unsurprisingly. She talked about it all the way home from the store, and throughout dinner preparations. Whenever she was offered a meal choice, she said she didn't like that, she was "full" and "I want candy." However she did eat something relatively healthy before receiving Smarties as reward. Oh, and just recently I realized that we've (as in the US economy) been in a bull market for the last five years or so, and are now on the brink of a recession. So, in my obsessive-compulsive way, and with other obsessions wearing thin, I've become interested in investing. I've decided to jump into the market, (which I was in before in my retirement accounts, but in a very inattentive and hands-off way) which will pretty much guarantee a recession. Sorry about that for the rest of you who've been minding your own business and practicing common sense investing. I assume this obsession will die a natural death, or at least go mostly dormant, fairly soon, when the baby arrives. Hopefully I won't lose all my investments before I start paying attention again. | | |
| Well, I'm running out of distractions, so I might have to start blogging again.  You know we have a new baby coming (in about 2 1/2 months. . . where did all the time go?), so I've been nesting. Or at least that's what I call it, since I've become consumed with aquiring baby-related items and re-arranging our house in preparation for the new arrival. I've been nursing addictions to ebay and craigslist, looking for the perfect double stroller (glider-rocker, changing table/dresser, big-girl bed for Elise, etc.) at the perfect price. And since all these articles require pick-up, rather than being shippable, I have to search craigslist in not only my own locality, but that of all my relatives within driving distance. I've enlisted an aunt and uncle, my parents, and a brother to pick up items for me. (Although we did fail in our ebay attempt to acquire the glider-rocker in my brother's neck of the woods, so he was let off the hook. And of course, the failure has only confirmed in my mind that that particular style of glider-rocker would have been ideal for my little house, even though my dear husband isn't sure where we would have put it.) And since you never know when the perfect item might be listed, I have had to conduct all my searches daily, right? So the happy news is that I think we've acquired all the big items we wanted, with the pick-up of a dresser/changing table on Saturday, and we're very happy with the deals that we've gotten, even though our family may be slightly dubious about our expensive tastes. But what am I going to do with all my time now? There's still the house. . . We're emptying the third bedroom that we've been using as an office, to make it the new nursery. There's still a bit of work to do there. And then it has to be painted. I'm pretty happy with the re-arrangement of the living room to accomodate the inclusion of a desk and computer, even though they're not ideal living room decor. We have yet to assemble Elise's new bed, and redecorate her room with the new curtains and bedclothes that will transform it from unisex to girlie, but that should happen soon, maybe in this next week. And then there's our bedroom, which needs room made for a small bookshelf, filing cabinet, and cradle. Oh, and we have peeling paint in our upstairs landing, so that needs to be fixed somehow, and repainted. And of course, the trim in both bathrooms in not yet finished. Are you tired yet? . . . But since I first started drafting this post on Saturday, I've discovered a new treasure trove on ebay -- used baby clothes! Since I have only one outfit in blue, which I purchased this past weekend at Walmart, the large lots of infant clothes at really low prices look very enticing. So maybe I'm not quite free from my ebay obsession yet. | | |
| Well, if you don't want to know what sex baby we're having, you should close your eyes now. Or close this web window. Although I don't really understand the whole "wanting to be surprised" thing, so I'm not going to go to any real effort to prevent you from looking ahead and finding out. We're having a boy!! Very exciting, a bit daunting. I've got some girl experience now, but I'm sure a boy is going to be surprising and different. It's nice to know, though. Sometimes I sit and smile when I think of our coming little boy. It's nice to anticipate having him. Now we need to start thinking about names, which is a not a quick and easy task for us. Surely four months should be enough to come up with something we can agree on.  But don't congratulate me on having the "perfect family", with a girl and a boy. I feel very rebellious about that whole "perfect family" thing. Partially because my husband sort of buys into it, I guess, and I'm hoping for more than two children. I like the idea of having siblings of the same sex, since it seems like they can understand each other better. And I like having a sister. And my brothers like having a brother. And the perfect family has four kids, because that's how I grew up, and my parents grew up, and three sets of cousins grew up. But maybe I should just take one thing at a time. Save my rant for something more deserving. We have a healthy little boy on the way, and we're grateful. We're looking forward to seeing him, but glad we have a few more months to prepare. | | |
| So, have you ever felt that words are just not long enough to convey the full strength of what you are feeling or want to express? That if a word just had a few more syllables, it would say it much better? Or if it just sounded a little bit different, it would express exactly what you mean? I seem to have that perspective on verbal communication. I coined the word "exhaustipated" one day when I was too tired to get out of bed. Of course, Jerry's initial response was "it sounds like a personal problem", but I guess it struck a chord, because he has since incorporated it into his vocabulary. I'm currently enamored with the words "splendiferous" and "splendicious". The real question is, is this proclivity for creating and expanding words genetic? Because Elise named her blanket "bing", and her pacifier "baboo" (rhymes with "taboo"). However, in the last couple weeks, apparently "baboo" has been deemed insufficiently expressive, because we went through "babooey" and "babooah" and seem to have at least temporarily alighted on "baboobah". | | |
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