Dear Kid,

So the baby Prince has a name, which is lovely news for the prince, the royals, the royal watchers, and mommy bloggers everywhere. Website are positively exploding with blogs about baby names and baby naming traditions. Which means that I won’t be writing a baby name opinion piece even though I’ve done eons worth of research on naming miniature people. (Eons = two and half minutes.)

But I can’t resist sharing a small tidbit or two. Did you know there are countries that regulate what babies can and cannot be named? Many have reasonable laws like the name can’t be obscene or something that will do irreparable harm to the child. Others have laws that say you have to be able to determine the child’s gender from the first name. Which means no boys named Leslie or girls named Charlie.

As far as I can tell, however, there are no regulatory positions on how and when other people can weigh in on what the newborn is named or nicknamed. There isn’t a legislative body in the world ready to take on the mother-in-law lobby.

Speaking of babies, as you know I have a relatively new laptop. Last night, it ceased working. Well, it partly ceased. It might also have slightly desisted but I’m not technically savvy enough to be sure. What is certain is that I couldn’t get any work done because my mouse was frozen solid. (Frozen mice might be good for snake food, but are not good for Mom Productivity.)

Today, I packed up my comatose laptop and after work went over to MicroCenter to visit the happy “we can fix your technology problem” people. I got there prepared to be patient and agreeable. I was prepared to be patient and agreeable until closing time if necessary. I was prepared to work hard to solve the problem. What I was not prepared for was finding that the helpful people weren’t there. The door to the help center was closed. It was so closed there was a sign on the door saying it was closed (just in case you weren’t sure).

“Can I help you?” asked a helpful looking customer service dude.

“Errrrggggle,” I replied pointing at the door, “They aren’t home?”

There was a great deal of conversation among all the people in customer service during which we firmly established that Rob had gone home for the day.

“Oh.” I said. And to be sure, I repeated myself. “Oh.” After a pause during which I search for a working brain cell I said, “Ok. Where can I go to get help?”

“What’s wrong?” asked the aforementioned helpful looking dude.

“I think my computer has food poisoning,” I told him. He laughed, because he recognized that I am hilarious. I told him about the frozen mouse problem after which he offered to try to find a tech to help me.

Sure enough, helpful dude sent over a tech to whom I carefully explained and demonstrated the problem. He glanced at my laptop, muttered a silent incantation, and started moving the frozen mouse around. Huh?

“Wow.” I said “It’s behaving better for you than it did for me.” And that’s the end of the story. Magic meets laptop. Zap! Unless you count him showing me how I had accidentally turned off the mousepad and there was nothing at all wrong with laptop baby.

The furry baby in my life, Booker, was very talkative this evening. I’m pretty sure our conversation had a lot to do with him wanting pasta and peanut butter, but since food is generally his main topic that shouldn’t be a big surprise.

Have a good day, baby!

Love, Mom