Okay. Shelayla. Right. Going for an Irish baby time. That's fine. Totally fine. What's not fine is giving your child a name which roughly means, "Cudgel." I mean seriously folks, do we hate the poor little thing already? What's going to happen when this poor, sweet little girlie can't find her name in any baby book because it's not a name it's a noun. Not only that, a noun that means 'stick for beating things with,' Talk about potential self esteem issues. Furthermore, it's a made up spelling, adding insult to injury. I Googled it as a first name, and it only came up as a last name. As for Shiobhan, I hope this mother realizes that this is pronounced, "Hih-vawn."
A called today to tell me that this baby's a girl, and that she wants to be named Muriel. Mean mummy that I am (bas associations with the movie "Muriel's Wedding"), I nixed that, and asked her how she felt about Elinor. So far, so good. The Baby likes it, and if I can just convince B, we'll keep it. I'm really starting to fall in love with the name. Both spellings (Eleanor being the other one) are rather classic, and I think I like the Jane Austen spelling just a wee bit more. Of course, the fact that it happens to be the Tolkien spelling, too doesn't hurt it one bit. If in fact, Baby is a she, and she is named Elinor, we'll have to call her Nora or Nory for short. There are no less than 4 little Ellie's running around our immediate circle, and I abhor popularity when it comes to baby names. A was right about Ian, so we'll see what happens with this one.
I wish I could have talked to her longer, but the ILs were down. The oh, so frustrating ILs. I feel like such a jerk for not liking these people. I really do. They're very nice, but as my friend Adrienne puts it, "They're dumb. And not just dumb, but dumb and proud of it." MIL finished high school and went to beauty school. FIL had two years of Bible college (which usually provides a decent education), but has worked in factory jobs all of his life, and has just begun his second semester back in school to get his degree in business administration. I'm happy for him, but back to my rant. Anyway, I don't understand how their brain cells have lapsed over the course of the last couple of decades. I mean, how freaking hard is it to pick up a damn book? To be fair, all of MIL's time is spent watching her "soapies" and therefore she has no time to read. Note to MIL: A 50 year old woman ending words in "-ie/s" is not a cute sight to behold. Words ending in -ie/s are not automatically cute. Ever heard of scabies? 'Nough said. Anyway, self improvement in any form is unheard of by MIL, who is too stinking scared of everything to take even the tiniest risk for fear someone doesn't like her because of it. FIL's taking baby steps, but he's still obnoxious. MIL's gotten so used to being taken care of that she slips back into childishness (tone, mannerisms) without even realizing it. Drives me bonkers. We went to Red Robin for lunch. Glad we finally got one. Anyway, our RR has a tv installed in the floor right in front of the host stand. On the way out, the ILs have to stop and gawk, standing over said tv so that anyone coming in has to go all the way around them, and MIL shouts at the top of her lungs as we're almost out to the car, "B! Did you see the tv IN THE FLOOR!!! I didn't know they could do that!" Don't get me wrong, I'm all for wide-eyed wonder, but this is going just a little bit far, IMNSHO.
I don't like it when people spout things of which they obviously know nothing. Example. N has an incredibly dextrous left hand. He has excellent fine motor skills period, but his left hand amazes me. He picks up the tiniest things, and does the trickiest stuff with those little fingers of his. Anyway, B mentioned to The ILs that he's thinking N might be left-handed. MIL said, "That's weird, no one in our family is." I reply, "Actually, it's not that surprising, there are a lot of lefties on my mom's side of the family, particularly among the men." FIL (who can't bear to not have any attention and sympathy because his life has been soooooooo hard) says with a sulk, "I should have been left-handed, but they ruined it for me by making me use my right all the time at school." I asked him if he could write or do fine stuff with his left hand at all, and he said no, and blamed the school for ruining his Southpaw status forever. MIL (who, due to a childhood accident, only has a pinky and thumb on her left hand) pipes up and says that she might have been left-handed after all, but since she had to use her right, she was right-handed now.
Since I can't handle this kind of stuff being tossed out there as fact, I had to correct it. Hard dominance of one hand over the other is wired in the brain, you can't make it quit working. My Auntie Vi is a good 25-30 years older than FIL, and is a lefty. She said she used to hate the teachers in her school because they used to make her use her right hand all of the time. To this day, even though she never used her right hand in school, and didn't write that much at home, her left-handed writing is much clearer and neater than her right-handed stuff. I explained this nicely to FIL, and he sulked and said he was just thinking (He sulks a lot. B inherited the sulky gene. N better not've). I mean geez, heaven forbid the kid actually have a characteristic from
B came into the living room this evening with a large glass of milk. He was balancing it on his knee when N decided that 14 months was plenty old enough to be introduced to milk, MOM, and he'll just have some of dad's thankyouverymuch. He loved it. Too bad for him that was the last glass. No more until grocery day. Oh well. At least I know that he can have it, and it's not going to turn him into some sort of bloody-intestined, destroyed-gut-flora mutant.
No comments:
Post a Comment