The Mailbag, Part III

The end of school is coming like a juggernaut and I am feeling a little fried. (Just wait until they are home with me all the time! This blog may implode.)

I was very forthright with my intentions to use your questions to perpetuate blogs posts ad infinitum, and tonight is the next installment. Whee!

T asks: What is your favorite song to belt out in the shower or the car when you are driving by yourself?

Oh, T, there are just so many of them, and, in the interest of being truthful like I promised, I will admit that many of them are older country songs. More specifically, older country songs by Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn. It may sound corny, but I love me some Dolly and Lorett-y.

And here's the kicker, my kids sing along now! You haven't lived until you've heard Fiver singing "9 to 5." It's classic.

I love to belt "Here You Come Again," "Coat of Many Colors," "In My Tennessee Mountain Home," and, well, you get the picture.

But the one song that I'll always sing is "Coal Miner's Daughter," because it doesn't get realer than that song. And because I come from a family of coal miners so I have an even softer soft spot for it. (Even though we didn't read the Bible by the coal oil light and my daddy didn't have to sell a hog to buy us shoes in for the winter.)

Also? I love the movie with Sissy Spacek. How she got Loretta Lynn's accent so pitch perfect I'll never know, but man is that a great movie.

Sara asks: What are the reasons behind your kids' real names?

It may surprise you to learn that we are pretty old school around here. Aside from the odd daydream of naming my first daughter Apollonia, I have always gravitated toward more traditional names. To me they just sound regal and timeless.

Luckily, I married a man who was on the same page.

With Francie, we had picked out Lydia for a girl and Henry for a boy. As you may have guessed, these were not the names we ended up using. Nor have we gone back to them for any of the other children.

When I was six months pregnant, Rob came to me with a completely different name. He felt very strongly about naming the baby after someone in the family. He said it was sort of like an unspoken Scottish tradition, which explains why there are about six names in the whole country. He pitched the idea of naming Francie after my mother and me. So Francie shares her first name with her grandmother and her middle name with my middle name. (Except that everyone calls her by a common nickname, which is a name in its own right, and there are some people who don't even know what her given name is. We like to mess with people.)

We knew Fiver's name immediately, even though we didn't know his gender until his birth. He is named after his grandfathers: his first name is my maiden name and his middle name is Rob's father's name.

Sally's name was a late game decision. Again, we did not know her gender, but we were able to pick out a boy's name fairly quickly. We didn't definitely decide on her name until a few weeks before she was born. Her first name is Rob's grandmother's name (and his sister's first name, although she uses her middle name), and Rob picked her middle name after me. It is a kind of variation on my name.

Bun's name also came to us later in the pregnancy. We had the girl's name picked out, so we figured we must be having a boy. His first is not really a family name, although a case could be made that it is a variation on Rob's grandmother's maiden name. His middle name is after his father.

Alexis asks: How is your weight loss going?

Urg.

I guess the best answer is to say that it is going very slowly. S-l-o-w-l-y. Glacially slow.

I have lost about 11.5 pounds so far, which is good, but I still have quite a bit more to go. I am still doing my WW, and I am still mourning the loss of my pregnant self's ice cream night cap(s).

I have used WW to lose weight after each pregnancy, but I have to say that it has been harder this time around in the sense that I must be extremely strict about portion sizes. I used to be able to fudge it a little, but no more.

I have to count points and sweat every day. And even then I am only losing about half a pound to a pound a week. I know they say that's the healthy way to do it, but it's still a little frustrating. I don't know if it's my hormones, or the number of kids, or my age. I'm sure it's a combination of all three.

The old gray mare ain't what she used to be, my friends.

In fact, it's time to close up the mailbag because she needs her sleep.

'Night!