Her name is Danielle

Leora Danielle Robinson was born at 2:05 a.m. Christmas Eve. She weighed 8 pounds 11 ounces and is 21 3/4 inches long.

"All the gory details" will come in the next few days.

Logical consequences of nested naming

I made an interesting discovery today. Suppose your name is hyphenated, Newgard-Larson for example (my high school english teacher). Further suppose that you have sons and they grow up and become engaged. Since your parents considered it not preferable to suppress the maiden name, perhaps you or your fiance have a similar predilection. Suddenly you are presented with a quandary; does your fiance follow suit and add her maiden name to the previous portmanteau and create a double hyphenated moniker? Obviously this method of preserving the maiden name is not sustainable. Naturally it is impossible to preserve the maiden name through multiple generations while simultaneously preserving the given name through the same. Something has got to give.

Furthermore, suppose the finace has a hyphenated name of her own. Now we not only have a name with three hyphens, it is not obvious if name number two of four was the husbands grandmothers or mothers maiden name, since the wife could have added one or two of her own and three names must be possible to bring into a marriage else the original maiden name would be lost. Perhaps parentheses would be preferable to hyphens.

Suppose we abandon the pretense of preserving the maiden name beyond one generation, then the hyphenated name decision serves to preserve the maiden name for its former owner. Do the children have the same last name as the parents? If not then all children must have their given name changed at birth, if so they must have their name changed at marriage to prevent the name cascade. Of course the new fiance could replace her maiden name with the hyphenated name, but does it really make sense to give precedence to her mother-in-law's name over her own? So, both husband and wife change their name to delete the former maiden name and replace it with the new. This system is sustainable, albeit at the expense of two name changes instead of one (which happens anyway with hyphenated names) and at the expense of preserving the previous generation's maiden name.

Momma Momma

Jeremiah doesn't talk. Honestly, I think he chooses not to. Many people have heard him say a few words a few times, me most of all, but he's definitely not a chatterbox.

Today I was napping on the couch, cuddled up with one of Isaac's blankies, and Jeremiah climbed under the blankie with me. Then he looked at me and whispered, "Momma." Then he looked away. And he looked back and whispered, "Momma," again. Then he giggled and climbed out.

Very cute. Very sweet.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

John and I played Rock, Paper, Scissors. I won, so I get to have a baby tomorrow. I declined a second round that was to bet on if she was going to be a girl. We'll see how effective Rock, Paper, Scissors is at predicting the future. I think it will be statistically significant at the 95% level. (But I don't plan on testing this theory many more times.)

Jeremiah woke up at 2 a.m., and after waking John up 6 times, John got out of bed to get Jeremiah from his crib. He didn't want a drink. He didn't want to cuddle (which is the typical solution). He liked the light on...and John and Jeremiah stayed up until 5:30, when Jeremiah climbed into bed with me and was jumping off of my side onto the mattress. That's when John put Jeremiah back in his crib for bedtime.

Isaac decided that 4:30 was a good time to arise, and ended up taking a nap from 7 until 9.

I decided that I'd much rather do three kids in diapers than three kids waking up several times each at night.

Maybe we'll do Rock, Paper, Scissors for sleeping tonight.

But I'd have to wake John up first.

Monkey Boy

When Isaac was a couple months old, his Grandpa Brown decided that he would be nicknamed "Monkey Boy." Isaac has internalized this term of endearment. He climbs up our fireplace and doesn't want to come down, because "I'm Monkey Boy!"

But when he fell into our faux bricks on the wall behind the fireplace yesterday, he said "Monkey Boy no climbing fireplace," and sounded pretty sad about it.