Edited to add this relevant and interesting article by The Baby Name Wizard: “Congratulations! It’s a…Uh Oh.”

Sarah mentioned in her post today that she and her husband have a really easy time choosing girl baby names, but a hard time choosing boy baby names. I commented that I think it’s because boy names are REALLY DIFFICULT—either too common or too out-there. It occurs to me, though, that not everyone would agree with that: perhaps some people find boy names easy and girl names impossible.

So please be so kind as to vote: Is it harder to choose a name for a boy baby, or harder to choose a name for a girl baby? You don’t have to have named any babies at all to venture an opinion. And please feel free to elaborate at length, as baby naming is one of my FAVORITE SUBJECTS IN THE WHOLE WORLD and I will be hanging on your every word.

I am crabby today because of a discussion my mom had with one of her friends about weddings. The friend claimed that if you attend a wedding, you have to spend on a wedding gift AT LEAST the amount the couple spent on your food. That is, at a $50/plate reception, if you and your husband and two children attend, you have to spend a minimum of $200 on a wedding gift.

No. The couple plans their own wedding and pays for it in whatever way they have worked out, and those costs don’t have to be reimbursed IN ANY WAY by the guests.

Wedding presents are in fact COMPLETELY SEPARATE from the issue of wedding expenses. The cost of the wedding present is determined by the guest’s finances and by what the guest feels is the right amount to spend on a wedding present for this particular couple. That’s IT. There is no requirement that the guest factor in how extravagant the catering was, or how much it cost to rent the reception location, or how big a mortgage the marrying couple has, or ANYTHING ELSE.

Otherwise, it would have to go the other way, too. The wedding guests would have to subtract from the gift budget the amount spent on travel expenses to get to the wedding, and also subtract how much it cost them to buy their wedding clothes, and also subtract any wages they lost by missing work to attend the wedding. And if the guest had expenses higher than what the marrying couple spent per guest, the marrying couple would have to rush out to purchase more expensive food for that guest. I don’t think this is a road the wedding couple wants to start going down. And if they DO want to go down that road, I am WAITING. With a BASEBALL BAT! BRING IT ON!!!

I do have sympathy for both sides. My brother got married last summer, and the cost of a wedding is…well, it’s appalling. If you want people to sit down and eat, holy crap you are SCREWED. My brother and his then-fiancee went out sampling various catering options, and they came home stunned and glassy-eyed, saying “You can get better food through a DRIVE-THRU than you can get catered for $40 a plate!” And of course there’s also the flowers and the photography and the music and the favors and the liquor. But! All of these expenses are purely optional, and none of them belong to the guests.

Guests could stand to learn a lesson or two about “purely optional” and “not belonging to the guests” themselves. I have heard guests complaining that it is “tacky” not to have an open bar, or to have “only wine.” I’ve also heard guests claim that the marrying couple should pay for their plane tickets, and I’ve even heard guests say “My presence is their present,” which, oh my god.

Perhaps if the marrying couple agrees to stop whining about what guests “owe” them, guests will kindly stop acting as if the marrying couple is in any way obligated to do anything at the wedding other than get married. It is not, after all, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get smashed at someone else’s expense.” If the guests think the wedding should be about overpriced food and booze instead of about being there when a couple gets married, the guests can choose not to attend a wedding at which the focus is on the ceremony. Of course, the marrying couple MAY serve expensive food! And how very very nice of them to choose to do so, and the guests should be pleased. But must the guest then choose a more expensive present? No. …Wait, I think we’ve been here before.

Let’s review, shall we, now that we seem to be going in circles anyway? The wedding is not about the couple scoring lots of loot, or getting paid back for their wedding expenses. Nor is the wedding about free food and liquor and entertainment for the guests. The wedding is about GETTING MARRIED. Neither side is obligated to put out a lot of cash for the other side. And if either side chooses to do so, the other side is not obligated to balance the scales.

My mother-in-law made us a cookbook as a wedding present. It would do nothing but gather deep, deep dust except that when she visits she asks to see it, and then pores over her own recipes talking about how great they are and how much Paul loves them. Reminder: they are not; he does not.

This morning Paul wanted to make cinnamon rolls, and he knew there was a recipe in that book, so he got it out. He got the dough made (the recipe just said “dough” so he made a usual bread machine batch), and then got to the part where you make the topping—which is made in the bottom of the pan, since you flip the rolls out upside-down when they’re done. The recipe says to “put in butter and brown sugar.” No quantities. Then there is a sentence about how she’s sorry but she just does this by eye. Well, how about a goddamn estimate, then? Is it a teaspoon of butter or is it two sticks? Is it a tablespoon of brown sugar or is it the whole pound-size box?

It is not a surprise to me that we would discover this problem in her recipes. My mother-in-law scoffs at people who MEASURE things, and has great admiration for anyone who can put food together creatively—such as herself. I admire people who can cook without recipes, too, but I also admire people who cook WITH them, especially when they get good results, and when they can pass those good results on to other cooks. My own personal top rating goes to people who start with recipes in order to learn, and then go branching off from there—and who DON’T SCOFF.

Here is what I think: you either respect recipes or you don’t, and you can’t play it both ways. If you like to think of yourself as the “I just cook from my heart and it always turns out PERRRRRFECT, I just don’t UNDERSTAND people who have to use RECIPES, isn’t it GLORIOUS when you finally become a good enough cook that you don’t NEED them” type, like my mother-in-law, that’s fine—but then you don’t get to pass your recipes down to the next generation as if a recipe is NOW suddenly a deeply important thing. “Cinnamon Rolls: YOU know! Butter! Sugar! Dough! Jesus, figure it out!” “Meatloaf: Well…you MAKE A MEAT LOAF! Duh!” “Chicken Soup: Chicken! Soup! Put ’em together, moron!” Great cookbook, there, Mother-In-Law. You should shop that to publishers. You can call it “Any Idiot Can Use A Recipe. Except, Apparently, Me.”

Blogging is light on the weekends, which makes me feel lonely and bleak. Perhaps others of you feel just as lonely and bleak, and we can use this time to solve the world’s problems. Such as:

1) Do you know where I can get more chocolate-covered dried cherries? I finished TWO entire two-pound bags, and now Amazon.com isn’t selling them anymore, and when I looked up the brand (Traverse Bay Fruit Co.) I found information about dried fruit but not about CHOCOLATE-COVERED dried fruit, and now that I know of its existence I don’t know if I can go on without it. I’ve tried Dilettante chocolate-covered fruits and those are pretty good too, but what I want is pretty much exactly like Raisinets but cherry-based instead of grape-based.

2) If I drink alcohol, my muscles start hurting about five minutes later. Does that…MEAN something?

3) Rob was looking at my US Weekly magazine. He was giving special attention to the “Bikini Special!” section. Rob is EIGHT YEARS OLD. Are we seriously THERE already? And am I supposed to….I don’t know, STOP it? Like, hide my US Weekly magazines?

4) The men in your life—where do they buy their shorts? Paul has been wearing the same shorts for about ten years now, and it occurs to me that he’s looking…out of date. But I’m not exactly hip to what the young people are wearing these days.

Bonus points if you can answer all four.

Edward will not (WILL! NOT!) stop changing DVDs in the DVD player. He takes a DVD out of the slot, puts it away, gets out a new one, puts it in the slot, repeat every 30 seconds. I’m trying to let the twins have as much time out of their playpen as possible, but he keeps ending up back in there because of this. I actually wouldn’t mind if he occasionally changed the DVD, since he knows how, but it is seriously one after another, and once he cracked a DVD trying to get it out of the case, and sometimes he presses the “record” button, and so on. Any suggestions on how to keep him away from it? Preferably something CHEAP.

Henry is six weeks old today. I am imagining you all greeting that news with Jerry-Springer-audience sounds: lascivious woooops or sympathetic groans, depending on how you felt or feel or think you’d feel about having sex after taking care of a newborn all day and night for six weeks following nine months of carrying another human being around in a body built for one.

I copied Devan’s idea and made my six-week OB appointment (note: for those of you who are not hip to the childbearing thang, this is the appointment at which the OB gives you permission to Resume Relations) for more like seven weeks, but even so, here we are within a headache’s distance of it.

Listen, I am well aware that many women CAN’T WAIT to start having sex again. Some of them are rumored to be so hot for it, they break the 6-week rule. I’m not saying we can’t be friends anymore if you feel that way about it, but I’m more at the end of the spectrum where Jamie from Mad About You tries to get away with telling her husband that it’s six months.

Having a baby is very, very physical, and I am not a touchy-snuggly person to start with. Holding and nursing the baby maxes out my desire to feel warm skin against mine. Burping and changing the baby maxes out my desire to deal with another person’s bodily fluids.

And that’s not even including topics such as whether I can imagine doing anything in a nice soft bed except sleeping, or whether I can imagine having sex with someone who spent his whole evening on the computer while I held a crying baby.

I’m not interested, that’s all. Part of it is hormonal (at my 6-week post-William appointment, my OB said cheerfully, “This is what you can look forward to after menopause!”), part of it is the circumstances (newborn, sleep deprivation, milk everywhere, incision just barely finished healing), and part of it is my own personal capacity for physical contact (low).

Simple to explain that to a husband? Um, no. So next week I have to choose birth control (all the options suck) and then I have to act Happy To See Him.

It is astonishing how bad you can feel if your hair is greasy and there are wet milk circles on your pajama top, and the baby first refuses to nurse and then screams steadily throughout the rest of the events of this paragraph, and then your son calls from the bathroom that you have an opportunity to look for the metal ball he swallowed two days ago, and the ball is still not there and then the toilet clogs and you can’t unclog it, and you go back out to the living room and notice a cat has barfed on the couch, and there’s a bad smell coming from somewhere in the house, and remember that baby has been screaming this whole time.

So let’s not talk about that! I have a different topic. My mom and I were trying to pin down which elements of a wedding make it seem tacky or tasteful, over-the-top or lovely, etc. My mom and I are similar in many ways, but we didn’t agree completely.

We have to tread a little carefully here, don’t we, because the things one person considers tac-KAY, another person thinks are awesome and romantic. On the other hand, it’s the snarky comments about the tackiness of weddings we’ve attended that make this conversation the dirty little pleasure it is, so, you know, don’t hold back too much. My day could use some happy snarking.

Henry woke me around 5:00, and by 5:45 he was back to sleep and I had to make the kind of decision that these days confronts me again and again and AGAIN and dominates my mental and physical landscape: Do I try to go back to sleep at this point and then have to drag myself up again in 15 minutes or 45 minutes or an hour, feeling nauseated and resentful? Or do I stay awake, because I’m already awake enough to feel okay about that idea, but then later feel exhausted and irritable because I should have slept more?

I got up. It’s 8:15, too soon to call the decision. Ask me again around 2:30 this afternoon.

I’m up and down as usual. Sometimes I’m despairing because I can’t seem to turn my mind to even one small thing such as a quick answer to a short email. Or because I seem to spend all evening pinned under a newborn, and then bedtime comes and goes with no change in the situation. Other times I’m eating a bowl of ice cream at the computer and I run out of computer stuff I want to do and so I sit there aimlessly feeling all groovy and bored. Or I get a bunch of things done one after another and feel all successful. Or I look back and realize I’ve been gradually successful: it’s uphill, and things don’t get done as often as they should, but for example Rob changed his sheets this weekend when he was cleaning his room, and I had to change William’s when he woke up wet a day or two later, and then last night I was clock-watching for the kids’ bedtime and realized I had a couple of free minutes to change Edward’s crib sheet, and so you see it DOES get done bit by bit and that’s encouraging.

But then at 5:00 in the morning I’m nursing the baby, and he’s writhing and keeps latching on and off, and when I burp him he spits up on my finally-got-it-laundered shirt and on my finally-got-it-showered self. And then I change his diaper and he spits up a little more, onto his finally-put-him-in-fresh-clothes outfits and into his finally-washed-that-kid’s-hair hair, the changing of which and the washing of which had previously been one of my encouraging accomplishments. And then as I sit back down with him, my body sore from sleeping in the recliner most of the night, he fills his freshly-changed diaper. At 5:30 a.m., things can seem cyclical and unending. But now it’s 8:30 and I’m dressed and damp-haired and blogging, and eating from a 2-pound bag of chocolate-covered dried cherries, and ignoring those suspicious sounds from the other room, and things are good again. These first few months are so nuts.

I have a book to strongly recommend! But there is a small problem. My mother-in-law is distantly connected to the author: the author is related by marriage to someone who lives in my mother-in-law’s town. To my mother-in-law, this is almost the same as having written the book herself, and she is taking an unusually intense interest in the book’s success. If I were to write about the book, it would not be astonishing for her to find my blog in one of her searches.

So! I must somehow communicate the book’s title and author to you without mentioning either one! Anyone up for a game of charades?

How about this instead: This super-secret link!

I lovvvvvvvvvvvvvvvved the book. As much as I liked the HARRY POTTER books, I kid you not! Maybe even…MORE.

I ran into a casual acquaintance today at the park. She was there with her husband and kids. After about an hour of watching/hearing her husband, I’m 98% sure he’s abusive–and if he’s not, I’m 100% sure he’s an unpleasant asshole. He’s a guy I knew a little bit in high school, and I hadn’t seen him since. Over the years I’ve known her, I have gone on and on and ON to her about what a fine upstanding fellow he was: so smart and so respectful and so responsible and so mature–because he WAS in high school. I was trying to say nice things (“Great husband! Nice choice!”), but now I imagine her listening to my way-off crap and feeling like now she can’t confide in me that he’s actually one of those tightly-wound guys who, in a movie, would soon be cackling crazily and wielding a shotgun. I feel like a right dumbass. No wonder our friendship never seemed to move forward. Also, I have that “wanting to fix it” feeling (“Should I ask if everything’s okay?”) that never leads anywhere good.

William swallowed a Magnetix ball–it’s like a metal marble. Luckily he didn’t swallow one of the little magnetic parts of the set: those are the pieces that have caused the sets to be recalled. The pediatrician says “all we have to do is watch for it to come out.” Well, I don’t know if you’ve had this “watching” privilege before. I never had. I’m glad that what we’re talking about here is not, say, a valuable item that must be retrieved, and that after I “find” it, I can let it flush right down the toilet.

I am stricken by my stupid procrastination. I’ve been meaning for MONTHS to pack up the Magnetix and mail them in for the replacement toy, but I’ve been so MAD about it: I don’t WANT a stupid replacement toy, I want our money back. We spent a lot of money on multiple sets of Magnetix because they were so awesome, and now they’re, you know, FATAL, and so even though it’s a stupid decision to keep them in the house, I feel angry about the lost money and the replacement toy, and so I put it off. Dumbass.

Also, I feel despair at the way even a six-year-old will still EAT A TOY, when I thought we were about three years past worrying about that.

And I feel hopeless because we’ll probably never find all the little dangerous magnets that have fallen out of the plastic sticks: the other day, the cat had a little chain of magnets hanging from his collar. They’re tiny, they’re everywhere, and they can be fatal if the child swallows more than one, and there’s no way we can find them all. My solution? Don’t think about it. GREAT IDEA! I’m lucky it was William who swallowed a piece, since he can tell me that he did. And I’m lucky he swallowed a non-magnetic component, which is not dangerous unless he also swallows a magnet. And I’m a total dumbass for keeping this toy in the house just because I’m sulking about the money.

To be fair, I’m not the dumbass who ate the metal marble.