My son is famous!

Yes, that hot stud with the goat is none other than Garrett White! And considering that the King George Journal has a circulation of about 65 households, Garrett is famous (in KG terms). They did a big article on the KG 4-H Livestock Club. Now you can see Garrett in action! The sale was May 12th, and while the young lad did profit well from his goat raising, I think we're all breathing a sigh of relief that the goats are gone.

Drumroll please!

Well, if the picture above doesn't spell it out, I will....we are p..r...e...g...n...a..n...t! Timmy and I have had a little secret for the past couple of months and now we are ready to share with the world! I am almost 14 weeks along and due November 24th, the day before Thanksgiving (I can just imagine what Thanksgiving dinner from the hospital cafeteria is going to taste like!).
No pics of me with belly yet because for now it just feels like the normal chubby stuff I always sport. My pants waist is definitely shrinking, but other than the gigantic melons on my chest, nothing else has changed much. When I have a belly that is unmistakably "baby", I will definitely share! :)
I'm not sure how we held out this long considering that I have been puking daily since Week 6 and I am napping every afternoon the minute I get home from work. But apparently people did not think this was out of the ordinary. The kids are soooo excited and already want to know if it's a boy or girl (we should find out end of June). The first thing we told them was "No, you can't name it, and yes, you can help pick out bedding". That seemed to satisfy them for now!

What's in a Name?

Gotta admit it, I "borrowed" this from a fellow blogger's site (Venting Vagina) but it was too good not to share! As a teacher, I have met my fair share of "Brittney, Brittny, Brittneigh" and laughed out loud several times!

Complaint Box Brittney, Brittny, Brittneigh
By PAUL SCHMIDTBERGER
I saw a birth announcement the other day and groaned. In recent years, I’d learned to accept the flood of trendy tots named Madison, but this was my first Madicyn. If you care about spelling, my advice is to pour yourself a stiff drink before untying that pink or blue ribbon and reading news of the blessed event.
In a similar vein, leafing through the newspaper these days is like crawling through a minefield of makeshift names. An article will catch my eye — say, something about a tornado that just missed ripping through a preschool beauty pageant — and I dread what’s coming next. They’re going to interview the pint-size witnesses, and I’m about to meet little Brittney, Brittny, Brittneigh, Brit’nee, Brittani and Bryttney. If you absolutely have to name your child after a rugged French peninsula, then get out a dictionary and look it up. It’s Brittany.
I have a major gripe with the trend of misspelling baby names. On purpose. The parents’ logic runs something like this: “My child is special and unique. Thus, my child deserves a special, uniquely spelled name.” The upshot is that Chloe becomes Kloey, and Jacqueline metastasizes into something ghastly, like Jaq’leen.
It would be easy to blame this on celebrities, since there appears to be an unspoken contest among them to saddle children with awful names. Gwyneth Paltrow set the bar high when she named her daughter Apple, but not high enough. Reign Beau, daughter of Ving Rhames, and Vanilla Ice’s Dusti Rain and Keelee Breeze are way up there. For boys, could any name be worse than Bronx Mowgli, son of Ashlee Simpson and Pete Wentz? Perhaps Jermajesty Jackson?
Not that this is just a Hollywood problem. All across America, parents are mangling names in a misguided mission to trumpet their kid’s individuality. Take the wildly popular name Chase, which is actually not a name at all, but something a dog does to its tail. It was annoying to begin with, but now it gets worse as it slowly mutates from Chase to Chace, and on to Chayce.
If there were any truth to the idea that a particular name can guarantee a particular character trait for the child — or vice versa — most people would be named Vaguely Dissatisfied. Or Kinda Bitter. In my case, my parents could’ve just named me Unemployed and saved everybody a lot of trouble.
Misspelling a child’s name won’t make Junior special, creative or unique. Y’s and I’s are not interchangeable, and apostrophes are not some sort of newfangled confetti to be sprinkled liberally throughout groups of letters. Parents shouldn’t impose cryptic, incoherent or foolish spellings on their own children, nor on society as a whole. And they shouldn’t condemn their children to a lifetime of bleakly repeating that, no, the name in question is spelled “Shaiyahne,” not “Cheyenne.” (And while I’m at it, don’t name your child Cheyenne, either.)
The liberty to name one’s child is not always absolute, certainly not outside the United States. In France, for example, the district attorney has a short window of time after a child is born to block names contrary to the interest of the child, including those that are pejorative or rude or would cause ridicule. I’m not suggesting we commission a similar corps of name police in the United States. But I am saying that a little humility and some common sense would go a long way.
Paul Schmidtberger, author of the novel “Design Flaws of the Human Condition” (Doubleday/Broadway, 2007), was born and raised in Schooley’s Mountain, N.J., and now divides his time between Paris and New City, N.Y.