Naming

My Aunt Barbara has been staying with us for the last week-and-a-bit, on and off. She lives in Florida, and it's been a couple of years since my kids have seen her at all. They're like pigs in slop with all the attention they're getting--little consumer-driven, Aunt-Barbara-wants-to-spoil-us-rotten-and-we're-not-going-to-complain pigs.

N, especially, has been loving having Aunt Barbara here, because she's actually been playing with him--or, more specifically, watching his many activities and submitting to being bossed around by a not-yet-7-year-old who seems to have the bossing abilities of a man many years his senior.

[You're going to have to forgive me here, by the way. I've spent the last 20 minutes trying to figure out just how to make this into a cohesive story rather than a series of only loosely related sentences, and I just can't make it hang together. But I still want to say what I want to say. So please ignore the utter and complete lack of transitions. Or don't ignore them, but at least try to forgive them. Thank you for your cooperation. Sincerely, The Management]

One of N's 'quirks' is his extreme difficulty with names. There are people he's known for years whose names he still has trouble with...people he's known since he was BORN. Given time and hints, he'll get it...but it's a definite weakness he'll likely have to deal with all his life.

Thus it was not much of a surprise to me that he's been continually getting stalled this week when trying to get Aunt Barbara's attention. (Like most people, Aunt Barbara balks at responding to "Hey, you!") He's gotten better and better over time at covering for himself...my favorite this week was when he tried to ask me when Aunt Barbara was coming back from her friend's house where she stayed for a couple of nights, and wound up asking, "When will...um...uh...you know...our aunt be coming home?" Our aunt. Couldn't you just smush him up and eat him with brown sugar and butter melted on top?

Now, all of this is complicated by the fact that many, many years back--for reasons we have been debating on and off all week--I began calling my Aunt Barbara AB. (Short for, you know, Aunt Barbara. In case that was confusing anyone. Yes, feel free to despise me now for talking down to you.) Em has picked that up as well, but N had only ever referred to her as Aunt Barbara. Which only worsened the problem of his coming up with her name, since he wasn't hearing it from me or Em. Finally, however, after days and days of stumbling over her name and having to be reminded of what it was and of seeming to be visibly flustered by this problem--one of the first times I've seen him seem to feel badly about not knowing a name--he's finally given up, and has started calling her AB. Which, for some reason, seems unbearably cute and grown-up and yet almost inappropriate--almost disrespectful--coming from him. Still, the cute wins out. As AB said to me today, "I was going to tell him that you have to be a certain age to call me AB, but it's just so adorable coming from him, I can't bring myself to do it."

See? Not only rambling and badly constructed, but pointless as well! A trifecta of Bad Blogging!

This month simply can't end soon enough, can it?