I got this link and a friendly note from Caitlin yesterday (because unlike the rest of you, waiting for the death post to go up, she just assumed I was still alive and would respond to e-mail). At first I was horrified, and then she was like, Um, hey, Mrs. Kennedy? I think it's fake? And I was all, But it's on the Internet! It must be true! So I lose ten points for Fussy House, and have been assigned extra homework on the life of P.T. Barnum.

It also got me thinking how when Caitlin was little she was likely one of a few lucky girls with that nice Irish name, and how nowadays every other girl that pops out of the chute is named Katelyne or Catelynn, or, my favorite, Katelon. "No, I don't go for those human children, my daughter is a Katelon 2000 with turbo boosted skip-rope action!"

I used to work with a woman who named her son Sabastian. She said, "I wanted his name to be Just a Little Bit Different." And I could only think, No, different would be naming him Chuck or George, what you've done is to make sure that people will mispronounce and misspell his name for the rest of his life.

There was an interesting article about baby names in the NY Times last Sunday, and they were saying how the trend of naming kids after places (e.g., Paris, Dakota, Indiana, Burbank) is peaking and the next trend is likely to be naming kids after things. This theory prompted much hilarity between me and my Boss yesterday, wherein we constructed an imaginary dialogue between a parent and his two children, Table and Keyboard.

File under: Child, Genius A propos of nothing, I just found Jackson in the bathroom yelling, "Mom! Mom!" He had a bar of soap on the edge of the sink and then he let it slide down to the bottom and said, "Look! Skateboarder!"