My Little Greek Olive

Or, more accurately, my little Greek-Russian-Irish-Welsh-Hungarian-Scottish olive. The "bean" has graduated to "olive" this week, but somehow that just doesn't sound as cute. And plus, it makes me think of martinis, dammit. Grape, maybe? Now I'm thinking of dessert wine, which strangely, I've been craving. Anyway, at somewhere between an inch and an inch-and-a-half, it's really hard to believe s/he can be taking up so much space in there, but my non-existent waistline is proof. I swear it's not that bag of Cheetos or the double order of tiramisu...

Not only has the little bugger been growing up a storm over the last week and a half, but there's been a lot going on around the house too. My mom was in town from Thursday to Monday. The visit was a birthday present to her from me and Sean, and what a thoughtful present it was! If it wasn't enough that she's working at Bray Whaler while maintaining her own business, she's also moving this Saturday. And it's not as though this trip was even a relaxing respite from her daily, crazy life. We did the marathon shopping thing, flipping though hundreds of rugs at ABC Carpet & Home, spending hours planning the interior of the PAX storage wall in the office/baby's room (well, she did, while I crashed on the MALM floor sample), and hitting every bedding and bath store in a 25 mile radius of Hoboken searching for THE curtain rods. We perfected the art of "honing," (driving in increasingly smaller concentric circles around the target while cursing out Emily, whose maps are shamefully out-of-date), and she did an amazing job not punching my lights out when I got cranky. All in all, I think it was a great birthday present.

Even though it took two tries to put it together (thank GOD for Sean on Saturday night), the Great Wall of Storage tripled our closet space and made room for baby and anything else we might acquire in the coming months. There's no way I'd have been able to plan it the way she did. She's also really good at installing hardware like curtain rods, which requires the confidence to make permanent holes in walls that I just don't have. And before her visit, I might have been content with a several hundred dollar "hand tufted" rug from Home Decorator's Collection, whereas now I know better and will be satisfied with nothing less than a hand-knotted Tabriz in the rarest of colors with 110 knots per square inch. Dammit again.

So, her visit really tied up a lot of loose ends around here and got us extremely organized. But there is one dilemma that it raised: what will the baby call her? It's not too early to think about this either, because if we knew, I'd already be referring to her as "_______" in this blog. We went over several options but none of them seemed right. We ruled out "Grandma" and "Nana." Beyond that, we're stumped. Any ideas?