When we left off, I was working my way through the List of Things to Tell You poem:

Happy with comments
Front teeth; portrait appointments
Lost phone list
Crown, and already chipped
Too much apocalyptic fiction

Let’s do the front teeth next: Henry has lost both his two front teeth. Don’t be ridiculous, that’s nothing to CRY about. Just because I’ve had ample opportunity to notice that the baby/adult front-tooth transition is the one that pretty much ends the young-child stage completely, and just because this is my LAST BABY—goodness no, I’m fine, stop patting me.

I took him to get his picture taken to mark the occasion, which is something I highly recommend. I consider portraits such an enormous and stressful hassle (choosing what child should wear! child not cooperating with photographer! all the attempts to sell me “portrait collages” and “enhancements”!) and EVEN SO I would highly recommend the front-teeth-out portrait. They tend to be my very favorites, and it’s such a short stage: I have one million snapshots of, say, “age 6,” but only a very few that show the missing front teeth. I usually try to dress the child in a very neutral shirt, ideally one that is close to the color of a studio backdrop: I dressed Edward in light blue, for example, knowing there was a light-blue backdrop, and I dressed Rob in light grey, knowing there was a light-grey backdrop. This helps direct attention to The Teeth.

It was puzzlingly difficult to get an appointment. There’s no big portrait occasion in May, is there? But the session went well. I mean, Henry was pretty terrible, but the photographer is the kind who can catch the half second between “making a stupid face on purpose” and “covering an accidental smile with his hand,” and I’m happy with the photos. I dressed Henry in a t-shirt that was kind of old and grubby and that I knew wouldn’t go particularly well with any of the backdrops—but it was a sentimental choice because it’s been a favorite shirt, and all five of the kids have worn it.

Let’s see, what’s next? Oh, the lost phone list. We somehow LOST our phone list, the one we keep tacked up next to the phone. Since it’s a printed-out list, it should be no big deal: just print a new one. Except, er. It turned out I hadn’t updated it since adding Rob’s first grade teacher’s phone number at the beginning of that school year. (Rob is almost done with 8th grade.) I just kept writing new names/numbers in the margins. So this has actually been a huge problem. It’s not just that I’ve lost numbers, it’s that I can’t even remember whose numbers I’ve lost.

And finally, the comments. I think I’ve mentioned that switching from Blogspot/Blogger to WordPress was a huge and stressful hassle. BUT: one thing I love love love is the new commenting set-up. No more word verification! All I did was put it on “moderate first comment.” So all the spam comments get sent directly to moderation, and they never show up on the blog! And everyone else has to wait for their first comment to show up, but then they can just comment freely without having to figure out what those blurry letters/numbers are!

The downside is that the word verification was apparently keeping out a huge number of spam comments: I’ve moderated over a thousand in the short time since moving here. With word verification, I would sometimes get a few spam comments leaking through all of a sudden, but usually they were few and far between. It’s not all THAT big a deal to click “spam” a thousand times, but it’s not uplifting to the spirit, either. And my eyes have to look at those comments, even briefly, and a lot of them are gross.

Oh! And here’s a weird thing I’ve seen others mention too: some of the spam comments are INSULTING, or express disappointment in the post, or they accuse me of plagiarism, or they complain that the feed isn’t working or the lines are going off the screen. Why would a spammer go that route, I wonder? (And if it has briefly flickered through your mind that perhaps these are real comments and I’m incorrectly assuming they’re spam, I don’t feel hurt by your doubting, THOMAS, and I’m happy to explain further that the comments are left by, for example “[BRAND NAME] LUGGAGE 4 CHEAP” and “MALE ENHANCEMENT NO PRESCRIPTION NEEDED,” and are followed by many, many links to various spammy locations.)

Wait, this was supposed to be about how HAPPY I am with the new commenting system. And I am! It’s great. And I could sign up for a spam filtering program that would help with the many spam comments; I haven’t so far because the one I want charges for that service if you’re a “business” site, and I think the baby names site might qualify now that it offers the paid private consultation option.