How to Pronounce Annalaé Rose

Annalaé is pronounced Anna-lay. Not Anna-lee. And, as Carl said, that's Anna like banana, and not like the little sister on Frozen.

People have a hard time with the Annalaé part of my child's name, even when I say it out loud. I can't tell you how many times people have asked, "Oh, what are you naming your babies?" and when I say, "The boy is Anders, and the girl is Annalaé Rose," they respond with, "Annalee Rose! That's so pretty!"

**facepalm**

I. Just. Said. It. Out. Loud.

Now, if you're reading it, and not hearing it said out loud, I can see the confusion. Like, you can see that it includes the word "Anna," but what the heck is that laé business? Accent over the e? How do you even pronounce that? Are you absolutely sure you want to name your child that? Because school teachers are never going to figure out how to say it and your daughter will be correcting roll call pretty much her entire life.

Yeah, I've heard it all, and I'm still naming my daughter Annalaé Rose. And yes, 2 first names to boot. (Her middle name is Ilana, in case you were wondering.) Originally, when I came up with the name at the age of 16, I had it spelled Annalé Rose, which I still think looks much cleaner and prettier, but it also looks like A-nail, which is a terrible way to have your name mispronounced. So, I threw in an "a" to confuse everyone.

Now, I'm well aware Annalaé Rose is a really big mouthful, and no, I don't expect people to use it every time they address or talk about her. Here are some acceptable nicknames:

Anna Rose: 1 less syllable, and the title of a Vienna Teng lullaby to boot.

Aria: It's her initials. Carl didn't want to name our child Aria, even though I loved the name, so we compromised and made it Annalaé Rose's initials, and agreed it can be used as a nickname. (Spoiler, it probably won't actually be used, but it is available if anyone wants to.)

Rosie: Short, simple, cute.

And I'm sure more nicknames will present themselves as time goes on.

So, yes. I'm giving my child a name that has withstood the test of time. Of all the names I've come up with over the years, Annalaé Rose is the one that has lasted. Elizabeth stayed a couple years. Chloe came and went. But this one? I've loved it for nearly 14 years, and I'm sticking with it.

This pronunciation lesson brought to you by someone who has been called "Samantha" her whole life, but is not actually named Samantha, and therefore doesn't care what people think.

4 days old

My twins, Anders and Annalaé Rose, are now 4 days old. I've learned a lot about motherhood in the last 4 days.

Chief among the lessons I have learned is that no matter how much warning you've been given, there is nothing that truly prepares you for it. 

I mean seriously. My understanding of what motherhood entails seems very clinical compared to what I've experienced in a piddly half week. 

When most people talk about motherhood, they'll tell you about the irrational and unconditional love, but until I went 4 hours without holding either of them, I didn't realize that translated to a desperate need, & a total craving to feel them against my chest and look at their little faces. I imagine it will wear off to a degree, but I love peeking in on them as they sleep to fill that need. 

I was also told about the exhaustion, but again, while I understood what it felt like to be exhausted, I didn't understand being awake at 4:30 AM, having not slept the entire night after averaging 2-4 hours of sleep all week (also after a major abdominal surgery), comfort nursing my son while my husband - who also hasn't slept more than 2-4 hours a night and has to get up for work and school in 2 hours - paces with our daughter, neither of us having any clue what's making our babies cry. I went through the list. Hungry? No, they just ate. Poopy? No, we just changed them. Too hot? Maybe, but taking off one of the blankets wrapped around them like a burrito didn't help a thing. Too cold? Impossible. Our bedroom is at least 5 degrees warmer than the hospital room. Sick, then? Possible. Neither of them were able to muster very effective burps after their last meal, & my girl has a rocket case of the hiccups. Maybe their tummies have too many bubbles. 

As our daughter settled into a fitful sleep and our son began to fuss because my still-developing milk supply ran out, my husband looked at me with heavy bags under his eyes, and a slight smile quirked at the corner of his mouth, which then quickly fell back into the neutral expression that takes so many fewer muscles to pull off. 

"This is what we signed up for," he whispered, stroking our little girl's head. 

And I nodded, because it's exactly what we signed up for, & we knew very well that babies meant sleep deprivation, even if we had no clue what that actually felt like. 

And even then, pacing around and burping my son while the incision in my stomach ached and begged me to just lay down, as I was coming to understand what "sleep deprivation" really felt like, that craving was still there. I needed Anders and Annalaé Rose so badly, and I needed to know what was bothering them so I could make it stop. 

Then there are hormones and emotion that everyone warns you about. The emotion started on Day 2, when the lactation consultant came to help me breastfeed. I had very little milk/colostrum at all and had to supplement with formula while using otherwise pointless breastfeeding to stimulate production. It's a fairly normal scenario, & I knew it was irrational to feel like a failure, but between the breastfeeding class where they tell you not to give your child a pacifier for 3 weeks to avoid nipple confusion, & that breastfed babies are smarter than formula fed babies, I definitely felt like a second rate mom for not only using formula, but giving in to the pacifier in the very first night. 

Yeah, for the record, my head knows better than that, & I'm a first rate mom for sacrificing my exclusive breastfeeding goal to insure my babies got the nutrition they needed. 

Even though the intense emotion started 2 days ago, this morning there were more tears. Not for any reason. Just because I'm so tired, and my babies slept too long after we finally got them down and woke up hungry, and I just love them so much, and my mom made me French toast and rubbed my legs, and my pain pills wore off while I slept, and basically feelings. 

They're napping now, and Annalaé Rose is squeaking in her sleep. I'm lying in bed, trying to nap while I process all these thoughts and emotions. There's so much to get done - I'm still recording the birth in my journal, and am only to the part where they whisked Annalaé Rose away without letting me see her, because she wasn't breathing. I wanted to do a birth announcement too, with a creative theme, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to just scratch that. "Hey, I had twins and here are some pics from my phone" on Facebook is really effective enough. It's survival mode now. 

So, to sum things up, motherhood is wonderful, but there's nothing to really prepare you for it besides jumping in. And if any of my non-parent friends are wondering, the joy of motherhood doesn't look anything like this:

It looks much more like this:

And it's worth it.

It's a sign!

It's funny how, apart from mommy forums, people don't really talk about the signs of impending labor. I suppose that's probably because most of them have to do with body parts that are taboo to talk openly about and/or things that look like they were drooled by Jabba the Hutt. 

Of course, once you get pregnant and start reading those mommy forums, people are all like, "Yeah, here's a picture of a glob of bloody mucous I found in my underwear this morning. I think I'm about to go into labor," and you're sitting there just going, "Um.... Ew?"

We talk about contractions, though. The problem with contractions is that they start MONTHS before you give birth, & not a week or two like the other symptoms. I first noticed contractions on September 12, when my mom pointed them out to me after my baby shower. I'd apparently been having them for a while, but since I didn't know what to look for, I didn't know they were happening. 

That was almost 2 months ago. Obviously not proof I'd be birthing babies anytime in the immediate future. And yet, it's the only symptom I knew to expect up front. I'm only just learning about some of the other, more pain-centered symptoms, and I'm learning as I experience them. 

Now, at 37 weeks (1 week after the doctors told me to expect to go into labor on my own... those jerks), I'm getting the unmentionable signs. I've had them for a week now, so we know it's soon. Very soon. Within the next 7 days, for sure. 

Know what the biggest sign is? The absolute proof that I'll go into labor within a week? 

I have a C-section scheduled in a week. 

Yeah. 

Both my twins are breech, meaning C-section, and I'm not going a day past 38 weeks. 

That makes for a pretty good sign of labor, don't you think? 

Priorities

Last Sunday I posted a very historic photo. It was the Super Blood Moon, a phenomenon that is really only once in a generation. Not only is it rare, but it is loaded with significance. Even today, in our modern and secular society, there are people who believe it's an omen of impending destruction.

I spent close to 2 hours fighting a tripod that was in a slight breeze, waiting for just the right moment, & I finally got a perfect picture of the event.

It was a tad grainy, but overall it captured the phenomenon better than anyone else in my news feed, apart from NASA. 

It did pretty well, as far as Facebook recognition goes. 19 likes, which is a good sized number for the crowd my posts usually draw. 

Then, three days later, I posted another picture. It garnered twice the number of likes, showing that it was clearly more important to people than this historic astronomical event. 

What could people possibly love so much more than a once in a generation event that is loaded with historical and religious significance? 

Cake. 

Obviously. 

Eureka!

Whilst organizing my "random junk" drawer in my desk at work, I just discovered I've had Altoids for the last 3 years.

Cinnamon Altoids.

'Tis a beautiful day.

Saturated Markets are Lame.

YA Paranormal Romance is my guilty pleasure genre. Twilight was my introduction to it, and like Eragon is many kids' introduction to the Hero's Journey formula, I was so taken with the elements of the formula that I was more or less blind to its faults for quite a while. Twilight hit the YA Paranormal Romance formula so well that it's no wonder it made such an incredible butt load of money. And it served as an entry to the genre for thousands of teenagers.

Of course, the more I read of the genre, the more I could pick apart where Twilight wasn't that good of a book, just as a lot of former Eragon fans like to complain that it is horribly cliche, and Star Wars/Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings/Everybody else did it better. And then came the Twilight sequels, and by the time I got to the fourth book, I just couldn't force myself to like it anymore.

But, it did introduce me to the genre, and since then I've read a good amount of YA Paranormal Romance.

Most of the books were somewhere between pretty good and great, and it was always fun to see how they pulled off different magic systems. I read one with Native American magic (the spirit animals were especially cool), one with Fae magic, and one with unexplained time travel, just to name a few.

The weird magic systems, however, were the ones based on Christian mythology. My first experience with that was Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments trilogy. Now, she made the magic system distinct enough that it was more or less easy to separate it from Christian doctrine, and to recognize it as a mythology. She played with angels and demons, and more or less left God out of it. The first experience was a little weird, but by the time I got to the third book I didn't even notice it anymore. Also, the addition of rune magic helped add a foreign element that made the use of Christian mythology easier to separate from doctrine.

Still, I wondered if I should really own the books. As much as I liked them, I was reading them in my 20's, and I knew that someday I'd have a 12 or 13 year old girl in the house, sorting through the books in my library, looking for something new to read. And a young teen may not have the experience necessary to separate doctrine from mythology.

Then I encountered Fallen, by Lauren Kate.

Now, I'll admit, I bought the book for the cover. Actually, I bought the first book in the series for the cover of the fourth book. I saw the add for it in the store, gasped at how beautiful it was, then looked it up and found out it was a long way into a series. So, I bought the first book (which also had a stunning cover), and read it in a single day.

Again, the magic system was based in Christian mythology. Except instead of angels and demons, it primarily dealt with fallen angels. And, again, it more or less left God out of the equation, except in backstory. The first book was good, so I bought the second.

The second one... not so much. First, it just didn't draw me in as well. Since I only read it once, I never bothered to pick apart why, but it really just didn't do the trick the same way the first one did. But more importantly than that, it did bring God into the equation, and it presented Him as a tyrant who punished anyone who dared question Him, and made Him out to be the exact opposite of everything I believe God to be.

And that one... I just couldn't separate. I couldn't dismiss that as, "Oh, this is just mythology." It was dealing with the nature of God, and it didn't deal with it well.

And so,I decided I wasn't going to own that series when I had kids. I don't need a book giving them such a negative view of God. They need to see Him as a source of comfort and guidance and love, not a tyrannical ruler who demands submission or else pain and your own perfectly crafted hell will follow.

So, I tried to hock it at a garage sale. That didn't work. Garage sale books go for like 50 cents a piece, and I wanted to recoup some of the money I'd spent on the beautifully designed hardcovers.

Flash forward to today. Lately we've been going through our books and movies and weeding out anything we really don't feel should be in the house with our kids (bye bye, Vampire Diaries season 2! I won't miss you). Incidentally, morally objectionable isn't the only criteria. I got rid of a painfully stupid movie adaptation of a book I loved because I don't want to watch it over and over and over when the kids are too young to realize just how retarded it is. Yeah. "Puerile" and "Stupid" are definitely valid criteria for clearing movies out of your collection.

Anyway, so far we've sold 3 of the books we listed on Amazon, and tonight I realized I still haven't listed the Lauren Kate books. So, I pulled out those gorgeous hardcovers with their stunning dust jackets, and I scanned them into my Amazon app.

Remember how Twilight was the introduction to the YA Paranormal Romance genre for thousands - if not millions - of girls? And anyone who walked through the YA section of a bookstore - or even passed the YA section of a bookstore - in the years following Twilight could undoubtedly see its influence. Vampires, dark magic, gothic covers, teen girls angsting everywhere.

Well, these books are post-Twilight angsty-gothic teen girl novels. And I'm pretty sure the craze is not just over, but so over, because when I looked them up, I found they're selling used for a penny each. That's the hardcover that's selling for such a pittance. No mass market paperbacks - gorgeous hardcovers. And new isn't much better. $3 a piece. When shipping costs and Amazon commissions are added into that, I'd be paying Amazon to get rid of them.

It's a pity I'm not out to buy any post-Twilight angsty-gothic teen novels right now. I'm more into stuff like Guess How Much I Love You, Dinosaurs on the Go, and Milo's Hat Trick. (Incidentally - that hat trick book is the most adorable story of a magician trying to salvage his magic act and getting a bear to jump out of his hat. Totally cute and recommended for any and all picture-book aged kids.)

Anyway, it's starting to look like I won't be recouping any of the money I spent on those books. I mean, I did spend the money like 5 or 6 years ago, but still. I hate the idea of just handing over something that should be worth like 10 bucks.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when paranormal romance comes into fashion, the market gets saturated, and then everybody wants dystopia. Hunger Games, look what you did.