The reason two year olds should not name their siblings...

Because, when I was expecting Maggie Mia settled on the perfect name for her younger sister: FISH. That's right, she pulled it from a line out one of her favorite songs, Three Dog Night's "Joy to the World." We were taking a walk one day and she was singing this song, which she had learned from a CD she would listen to in the car with her grandma on the days I worked. When she hit upon the line, "Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea..." she stopped mid-stanza and declared to Jeffrey and me, "Fish. That's it! That's a good name for our baby, Fish."

We could not convince her to call Maggie anything else until after she was born. Her teachers at church and school would ask her what her baby sister's name was going to be, and she would say, "Well, my mom and dad want to name the baby Maggie, but I like Fish." We did get some recommendations for hip ways to spell this name, such as: Physh and Phish and Fische. Apparently, according to an article on MSN this week, giving your baby a noun for a name is all the fad, so perhaps Mia was simply ahead of her time.

In any case, this week I have begun telling Mia and Maggie that we are going to name this baby, "Elsie Jane." Although Jeffrey and I still vacillate a bit, I figured that saying it out loud may help the name to stick. So of course, after talking with them about it during the day, I told Maggie that evening to tell her dad what her baby sister was going to be named. "GARCIA," she proudly declared. "Garcia?" I inquired. "Yes," she insisted, "Garcia." (Mia thought this was rather cool since the aide in her kindergarten class is Mrs. Garcia.)

No matter what I say, this baby is now "Garcia" to Maggie. I honestly don't even know where she had heard this name before. I tried to explain that this was a boy's name -- no help. Jeffrey reacted negatively since this was the name of the very cheap barber that his dad took him to when he was a kid who turned out to be a pedophile and was sent to prison (don't worry, Jeffrey was NOT a victim). Needless to say, we were not keen on "Garcia." But, for Maggie it is a done deal. Like "Fish," I am hoping it will fade away once the baby is actually born.



On an unrelated note, we have been studying and memorizing the Thirteen Articles of Faith over the last year for Family Home Evening. Mia has been doing great -- you should hear her recite the tenth; she has a bit of lazy "r" which makes it very cute when she talks about the "witerwal gathewing of Isweal and the westowation of the ten twibes."

Monday we were talking about the 12th which deals with sustaining the law. As we were discussing Mia asked a very insightful question, "What if the law is bad, like telling you not to pray. What do you do then?"

Jeffrey and I fumbled around for a minute, saying that it was a bit of a quandary, and then Mia said, "I guess we would just have to move to a different country." There you go. Leave it to the five year old to find a simple and direct solution to the problem.