More about fences and popular baby names

As S and I stepped into the backyard (now covered completely in shadows because of our giant fence, the vegetable garden in our heads was already on its way out) to take stock of our new backyard, dead sunflower stalks, bits of detritus tossed over the fence, a few random cinder blocks from Lord only knows what, a large depression in the center of the yard that may or may not have been a drain or the burial place of a beloved pet, we concluded the only logical thing: we made a huge mistake.

Buying a fence, I learned, is like making eye contact with the prettiest girl/boy you've ever seen in your life, or at least within the last hour, and then finally getting up enough courage to walk across the room and talk to her/him, only to learn, stunningly, that that person, who you've already given a Nobel Peace Prize to, or at the very least, a decent sense of humor is incredibly vapid. And now you have to do all this sort of backpedaling and either a) noticing minor defects about that person, like a mole that you had confusingly thought was a beauty mark, but that from up close is really more of a marring of some sort, a sign, that if you'd been able to see it more clearly, that this person was not for you or b) start having that same conversation that everyone has been having since some sort of standards about beauty were formed, about whether someone so incredibly good-looking is deformed in some way by those looks because of people always catering to them, and finding them funnier or more interesting purely because of the looks, and then they've got this sort of gap where most other folks learn to insert some type of personality. That's what a fence feels like right after you get it.

Names debate continued:

S and I have pretty much settled on a name but for some obscure reason, (one can only assume bizarrely religious) S has concluded that if we tell the general public the outcry will be so great that we'll be forced to change the name and admit that we're already failures as parents. Anyhow, because she's taken so long to finalize the whole name thing I'm starting to try and push for some other names before we get the end of the race. My brother has already taken one of the middle names that we could use and using the same middle name as someone else is pretty much the same thing as lighting a bag of poo on fire and putting on their front porch, or so I've been told.

Ergo; the name that I'm really pushing for, (mainly because I had a really great and sweet grandmother) is grandma. No one can convince me that the best way to honor someone in your family isn't to name them after them. And, for most of the time that I knew my grandmother I pretty much called her grandma. Ergo; I think the best name for our little girl would definitely be grandma. Note: A quick search of the social security web site shows that grandma has not appeared as one of the top 1000 names for children in the past ten years, so you'd be avoiding that whole confusing thing where everyone in the class is named Bella, or Katie or whatever. I'm pretty sure we'd have the only grandma in first grade. I'd like to see strong internet push to aid me in helping to convince S that this is the right name choice for us. It's a toss up between that and Su7san, where the seven is silent.(Special credit to Lindsay Manzo).