(no subject)

This morning I am home with Isaac because he has an appointment at 11:00 for his 4-year checkup (the scheduling whereof is a whole annoying saga that I shan't recount, at least not now, because I'm trying to put it behind me). So we dropped off Ruthie at daycare and came back home. We had scrambled eggs for breakfast and now Isaac is playing with his floor mat/alphabet puzzle - cum - train (EVERYTHING becomes a train when Isaac plays with it). He has just used the floor mat pieces (approx. 1-foot-square rubberish letters) to spell the word GRAPE and now is "driving" the GRAPE train around the floor. heh.

Isaac is not thrilled about the fact that he's going to be getting shots today (his first since his 18-month checkup if I recall correctly) but I have promised him a trip to Dunkin' Donuts afterward and hopefully that will suffice. I'm a little worried about the actual giving of shots, but well, whatever happens, it'll all be over a couple hours from now. ;) Okay, that wasn't much comfort. ;)

In other news I seem to have acquired several new LJ-friends as a result of my comment on the latest news post. Hi new LJ-friends! Are you yawning yet? ;)

Do Not Adjust Your Monitor

Hi! It's still me, the LJ user formerly known as chlaal. Thanks (perhaps) to some of your "votes" for me on the news post, I was gifted with a rename token from the LJ staff. So I am now mamajoan!

As I wrote recently, I had been considering a rename for a while. The name "chlaal," which I invented back in high school when I was a silly teenager, increasingly meant little to me and its particular uniqueness had become annoying. Don't get me wrong, it's nice to have a username that is guaranteed never to be taken on any website where you're signing up for a new account...but OTOH people always misspell it and no one knows how to pronounce it, yadda yadda, it just gets tiresome after a while.

In the aforementioned post, I also mentioned that I wasn't sure about switching to a name that defines me purely via my kids. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that a) everyone chooses a username that expresses only a small percentage of their selves. I mean, it might be the name of a band you like or a sports team, it might be your astrological sign or your cat's nickname or what your given name means in Sanskrit or whatever; but a username, which can be a maximum of fifteen characters, can never fully capture you in your entirety. So you choose what matters most at the time you choose the name. And b) at this time in my life, when my kids are so little, my "mama-ness" really DOES define me primarily. I mean, I'm many other things, but these days I'm a mama first.

And then, this morning after I found out that I had the rename token, I thought about it some more and realized that "mamajoan" actually does represent an enormous amount of choice in my life. Those of you who are new to my journal may not know that "Joan" was not my given name. I have a different first name on my birth certificate, and Joan is my given middle name; I started going by Joan in approx. sixth grade. And, of course, anyone who has read my userinfo knows that I had my kids as a single-mom-by-choice. So, in some ways, "mamajoan" is like an encapsulation of the person I have chosen to make myself into. And I think that's awesome.

So anyway ... here I am! "chlaal" is dead, long live mamajoan. ;) Love me or leave me! :)