rivka | (no subject)

Last night, while I was reading bedtime stories, I noticed that my continuing Braxton-Hicks contractions were starting to be both longer and more uncomfortable. So when I came downstairs, I timed them. Over the next hour, they came almost exactly eight minutes apart and lasted about a minute each time. Each contraction was not painful, but noticeable and uncomfortable.

"That looks like a pattern," I said to Michael, showing him my list of times. He agreed that it did.

"So here's what I think we should do: You clean up the living room a little in case someone winds up having to come over here. Then we should both go to bed."

We went to bed. I had some more contractions in bed. Then I went to sleep and slept all night, thus proving that I wasn't in labor. But at least the living room is clean.

Still not getting overexcited, because I did this sort of thing for weeks with Alex, but I am starting to feel like progress is happening.

So now it's time for a poll. I've been working my way through Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels in my copious free time. I've made it to #16, The Wine-Dark Sea. I'm a reasonably fast reader. So your poll question is: how close am I going to get to finishing the series?

[Poll #1343401]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

If you call the baby Jack Stephen Wald... actually, that would be kind of nice.

My mother suggested "Jack" for a boy, along with one girl's name that we really didn't like and the one we ended up picking, unknowingly because I'd deliberately ignored the e-mail with the suggestion.

(My reaction is that "Jack" is a nickname not a birth-certificate name, but I appear to be in a minority on that one, as I believe it's getting quite popular. And people would probably say the same about my name.)

I totally agree about "Jack". I don't really understand why people give their children shortened nickname-versions of perfectly good names, but hey, I guess that's not my problem. :)

My mother's family believed that you gave kids three names: plain, fancy, and subdivisible. The kid got to pick which name and change through life. Mother was Patricia Lois Jane (subdivisible fancy plain) and she always used Lois and changed her name to that.

I like that! Give a kid some *options*!!

Even just having a name with multiple nicknames helps. My brother is Richard and he started out as Ricky*, then in his mid-teens switched to Richard, and in his 30s to Rick.

*My dad was so sure I'd be a boy that he called me Ricky until Rick was born.

My grandfather was Jack all his life, but he was "John Walter" on his birth certificate. After he'd had a stroke, he was reportedly "not responding to his name" because they were calling him "John" and he didn't think they meant him...

I like the name Jack a lot more than I like the name John, and I like the name Kate a lot more than I like the name Catherine. However, I also like the idea of kids having name choices when they grow up.

We've actually done SteelyKid a disservice in that light, since her name doesn't obviously shorten or lend itself to nicknames, and her middle name is my last name. But I couldn't really see saddling the poor thing with four names, and her first name was about the only one we were more than just okay with.

It's a nice name. Opinions vary about whether it's really a disservice to limit nickname flexibility. The family I was born into believed very strongly that a person's name should be one's *name*, and anybody who altered it was simply wrong. After the example of my grandmother (who named a daughter "Elizabeth," and had so much trouble years later with high school kids dialing wrong numbers and asking for some girl named Liz. She had no idea why there were so many of them), my parents went to some trouble to find names for me and my brother that do not lend themselves to nicknames. So I grew up and chose a completely unrelated nickname, as you see here.

Hee! What if he winds up with the worst faults of both? I'd never forgive myself.

We're all set for a name.