The Best and Worst So Far

The Best:
(1) I seem to be a lot more popular when I'm carrying a cute baby girl around. I wish I had been able to get one in high school.

(2) Aletheia is a compulsive smiler, and everyone smiles back. Having her around is like having an industrial strength joy generator set to 11 all the time.

(3) When she's waking up from a nap, and I go get her, and she gives me a record-breaking wide smile. That's incredible.

The Worst:
(1) Post-solid-food poopy diapers. I literally can't change them without retching. How can someone so small and cute make such horrific stenches?

(2) I know every dad gets this, and I know it's just a silly little thing that people say trying to be funny, but for crying out loud, the next time one of you people tells me it's sure a good thing that the baby looks like her mother, I am seriously going to snap and kill something with my bare hands. You've been warned. I'll get a good lawyer and plead temporary insanity. Stay out of my path. Ha ha ha, I'm ugly. Ha ha ha. Shut up.

(3) "She'll be in second grade before she knows how to spell her name!"
"She's going to have to pick a nickname when she gets to school, you know."

Okay, this is a good time to link again to the Aletheia Name FAQ.

Next: Look, I run into dozens of kreativvvleigh spelled baby names all the time. Having one unusual name transliterated properly from the Greek can't be any more difficult than being Mikayla in a kindergarten class with a Michaela, Mykala, and Michayla. Right across the room will be Madisen and Maddisyn, as well as Katelyn, Kaitlin, and Caitlin. Yes, the name is rare, but get over it. We're living in a era of all-out onomastic anarchy, and "Aletheia" is barely going to register on the weird-o-meter.

Finally: what are we really talking about here? Eight letters. Two are repeats. It's not like your kid was spelling his name in kindergarten because he had learned to sound out the word phonetically. Nope. You just chanted J-o-n-a-t-h-a-n, J-o-n-a-t-h-a-n over and over until he memorized it. Jonathan, I might point out, is eight letters long, just like Aletheia, and only one syllable shorter. But did anyone tell you he'd have to be a super-genius to figure his own name out? Nope. They just said, "What a nice name!" You just think Aletheia is hard because you've never seen it before. She'll be writing it before she turns five. Not because she's got a brain the size of the proposed lunar base, but because it's not that difficult. But for the record, she does have a brain the size of a lunar base. It's so massive that it has a detectable gravitational field. When small items in the house disappear, they are usually in her hat or lodged in her ear. Five pets have gone missing in this neighborhood since we bought our house.

If you are having trouble remembering how to spell it, you might be helped by the Aletheia song that we sing to the baby:

My name is Aletheia, A-l-e-t-h-e-i-a!
My name is Aletheia, A-l-e-t-h-e-i-a!

I'm going to go to Harvard University
and be the president of the whole world.
I'll find a cure for cancer in my labratory.
Cause I'm the strongest, smartest, prettiest girl in the world.

My name is Aletheia, A-l-e-t-h-e-i-a!
My name is Aletheia, A-l-e-t-h-e-i-a!

Okay, rant over. That should hold me until her first birthday. I promise I'm nice in person. But watch yourself.