Why buy expensive toys?

I have no idea who this kid is, or who his parents are, but I hope my child is just like him. Simple pleasures is just one of the things I'm looking forward to.

What's in a name, Part Deux

I am listening to a podcast (by the way, how great are podcasts...I love technology) where Mel Kiper and Todd McShay are discussing the NFL draft. They're talking about the Seattle Seahawks' Matt Hasslebeck who, after a 10 years in the NFL, has requested that people call him Matthew. This seems to be the in thing. You no longer have a baby Mike, you've got a baby Michael. Also, friends of ours went with Leo as the full first name for their son, rather than Leonardo with Leo as a nickname, basically the exact opposite of the Matt-Matthew issue. Totally changes the whole baby name dynamic. Yet another thing to throw in the hopper.

Politically incorrect

My wife is beautiful and glowing. Aside from a small belly that looks rather similar to the beer gut I developed my senior year of college, she looks exactly the same. She's still fitting into a relatively large subset of her normal wardrobe, so is having only minor clothing issues. Most importantly, she's content, which makes her lovely and attractive. Now, I know I'm supposed to make similar remarks about how all pregnant women are beautiful and glowing, but I just can't. I mentioned how I'm now seeing pregnant women everywhere and the thing I'm noticing is that women are all over the board while pregnant. Some are tiny at 9 months, some look like they have swallowed a massive beach ball. Some women are beautifully groomed and lovely, some look as though they've never been introduced to the business end of a harbrush. I know I will make no friends in saying this but there you have it. All I know is that I'm a lucky man.

So far.

Trashy magazines

I'm flying to Adelaide at the moment and reading a trashy women's magazine over my wife's shoulder. I would say that 85% of the articles are about women with babies. There are pictures of Elle Macpherson's kids (and a gratuitous semi-clothed picture of the former supermodel, which is what attracted my attention in the first place), a story about an Australian news reader with post partem depression that wanted "crush her daughter's skull" with a silver Tiffany's clock (very descriptive, I thought...love the specificity in the writing) and the expose of the 2 months pregant girl who was skydiving when her parachute didn't open and survived the crash. The lesson here for aspiring journalists, add a reference to a baby in any story and you quadruple the interest of trashy women's magazines.

What's in a name, Part I

Names are tough. I'm going to do a few postings about this because there are so many considerations with new things to think about all the time.

Importantly, some traditional considerations have become no longer applicable. For example, you'd think gender would be a primary driver, but no longer. We dig boy names for girls. Elliot, Darcy, Jim. But then there is the reaction of others. My brother in law Matt hates the boy names for girls and likely hates girl names for boys as well but we haven't discussed it. So, we'd forever have in our minds that Uncle Matt disapproves of the name.

Also, there is the American-Australian cultural differences. When we told one of my best friends Mo that we liked the name Angus (a popular name in Australia), he threatened to call the child "meat" for the rest of his life. Not the reaction we're looking for from our multicultural little tike.

You also need to consider the name associations from your life (Jessica will have a horse face and Kevin will have BO). The visceral reactions of cruel school children are particularly important to us as our child will have the double handicap of being both a redhead (which means 18 years of either being carrot top or fire crotch, couldn't really tell you which scarred me more) and a Beatty (for some reason, Master Beatty is quite damaging to a 15 year old). So, we can't saddle the poor child with some names we love. Charlotte would be a harlot for most of high school and Bart would certainly smell like a fart during grade school.

Names are going to be tricky

Pregnant ladies everywhere

Have there always been this many pregnant people walking around? Has there been some sort of massive surge in fertility recently that hasn't been reported or am I just noticing this more often now. It feels like there are pregnant women eveywhere I turn. Pregnant bellies on the airplane. Pregnant bellies at the beach. Pregnant bellies in the mall. Pregnant bellies at business meetings. Pregnant bellies EVERYWHERE! I feel like I'm about to be overrun with children under 2. Or maybe it's just part of the paranoid neurosis phase that I'm going through.

Sam...

I've decided that I can't call the baby "the baby" any more. It's a bit too impersonal, so I've decided that for the purposes of this blog, I'm calling the baby "Sam". It's gender neutral, it's not on the actual list of potential names and we don't have have an inanimate object with that name (eg, Tommy is our car, Kitty is the kayak...). Done and done.