Newstocks

Anything’s better than Tarquin

WEEK

27

With little more than three months until Mandy is due to give birth, we’ve started giving more consideration to what we’re going to name our child.

Actually, Mandy had her list of names months ago. It’s me who is only now giving it some serious thought. The trouble is, I’m finding it a bit of a chore.

For someone who has played several online role-playing games in the last year, which have required me to name around ten different characters, this has come as something of a surprise. Naming them was never this difficult. Of course, I doubt our child would appreciate being called Mokkosh, Deimoss, Mime or Fasolt. And once given, there’s no changing our baby’s name if we subsequently decide we don’t like it.

So last weekend I sat down with our baby name book again and forced myself to read through every boy’s name from J to T. As I compiled my shortlist of potential names, I found myself preferring certain letters to others. Four names beginning with J made it to my shortlist, and five beginning with K. But by the time I reached T, I realised I hadn’t written down a single possibility since ‘Michael’. Perhaps my brain had just become numb after reading through 100 pages of names and having to quickly decide whether I liked each one.

Once I’ve finished agonising over my shortlist, I’ll sit down and compare it with Mandy’s. If we’re lucky, some names will be on both lists, and we’ll be able to agree on one of them. More likely, however, there will be no matches and we’ll spend the rest of the pregnancy trying to agree a compromise. Or we’ll just go for the first name that the two of us almost agreed on soon after discovering we were going to be parents.

We’re focusing on boys’ names because Mandy is convinced (and has largely convinced me) that the last ultrasound was less uncertain than it appeared at the time. We’ve also both found it much easier to think of girls’ names that we like; agreeing on one of them should be relatively easy, should the need arise. Nevertheless, I still feel a nagging obligation to go through the second half of the baby name book, to make sure there aren’t any others that I like more. I just wonder whether my sanity would survive another 200 pages.

In the meantime, we’re jokingly referring to our baby as “Tarquin” – a less-than-serious name assigned by one of our friends that’s so awful it’s stuck. Whatever name we finally settle on can only be an improvement on that.

Tattoo watch: Week 26

WEEK

26

The tattoo is now up to 4.8cm, an increase of 0.3cm in the last two weeks. If it keeps growing at that rate, we'll be looking at 7cm by the time the baby arrives!

Improvements to feeds and email alerts

Over the weekend I made some improvements to this site’s RSS feeds and email alerts.

Feed improvements:

1. Clicking the orange feed icons in the sidebar now takes you to a more user-friendly page which makes it easy to subscribe to the feed in your favourite news reader (be it My Yahoo!, Newsgator, Bloglines or whatever).

2. Feed items now include links that make it easy for you to email a post to someone or add it to del.icio.us.

The improvements also allow me to track how many of you are using the feeds and what news readers you are using.

If you currently use either of this site's feeds, to get the benefit of the new features you should drop and then recreate your subscriptions using the new feed URLs (this one for posts; this one for comments).

Email alert improvements:

1. Only one email will now be sent per day, rather than one per post.

2. Emails now look better and include the full text of each post instead of just an extract.

3. Emails no longer contain any ads.

If you are an existing email alert subscriber you should first unsubscribe by clicking the link at the bottom of the mails you currently receive. Then re-subscribe by entering your email address in the "Updates by email" section of the sidebar and clicking "subscribe".

The christening conundrum

WEEK

24

One of our first decisions as new parents will be whether to have our child baptised.

My religious beliefs oscillate between agnosticism (when I feel the need to hedge) and outright atheism (when I’m feeling more cocky). As such, I’ve never really seen the need for baptism. During one of the many church services that we felt obliged to attend in the run up to our wedding (which was held in a church), I had an opportunity to watch one. Listening to the parents swear to bring up their child as a Christian only left me more convinced that not only was baptism unnecessary, there was no way I could utter a similar pledge. It would just be hypocritical.

Mandy, however, does believe in the existence of some kind of God, although organised religion tends to leave her cold. As such, she’s concerned that if we don’t baptise our child and, heaven forbid, he dies, then he’ll spend the rest of eternity toasting marshmallows with Satan. When I’m having an agnostic day, I’ll admit that this nags at me too. Most of the time, however, I just think it’s a load of old cobblers.

The compromise we’re probably going to aim for is a christening where I don’t have to say anything I don’t believe in. Had the wonderful Anglican pastor who married us, Reverend Alan Tilson, not been kicked off the Island last year, this probably would not have been a problem. In his absence, however, we’re not yet sure whether any other priests will be so accommodating.

Since the recent vocal protests against adding sexual orientation to the Human Rights Act by many Bermudian Christians, however, Mandy’s opinion of Christianity has taken a nose-dive. As a result, she’s become much less enthusiastic about getting our child baptised.

While I suspect we’ll still end up doing it, it wouldn’t surprise me if Mandy insists on finding someone with a more enlightened view of homosexuality to conduct the service.

It grows!

WEEK

24

I measured Mandy's tattoo again this evening.

Seven weeks ago, when we first started measuring, it was a mere 3.8cm across. To my horror, it has now expanded to 4.5cm: the size I predicted it would be at the end of Mandy's pregnancy.

With around 16 weeks still to go, those estimates of 7cm are looking frighteningly plausible.