More pictures in restaurants

Sunday is Family Day at one of our favorite bar/restaurants. $1.99 kid's meals aka Wild Child meals. That's right - we love Buffalo Wild Wings, which we still call BW3. When I was pregnant with David, I was sick every single day from about 3-4 weeks until 33 or 34 weeks. The only thing that calmed my nausea was spicy food. I can't explain it, but hot, spicy chicken wings made me feel much better. So I went to BW3 almost every day of that pregnancy and got the hottest wings I could stand, stuff that burned your skin to just touch it. I can't even eat them that hot anymore, but I could tolerate some nasty hot sauce back then. Hormones, maybe? We tell David that he was constructed from chicken wings and Diet Coke - virtually all I consumed while pregnant.

So we were out, we took pictures. You get to see my new, shorter haircut. Totally unstraightened (shouldn't the humidity be diminishing by now? Shouldn't I not have to work so hard to straighten it? Oh well.) Aren't you lucky?

If you look really hard, you can see Matt behind David and me, playing a video game. Some shooter thing. He's quite good at those and Sabrina loves to watch. David, as always, prefers to be with Mommy. Such stereotypical kids: a mama's boy and a daddy's girl.

Don't Call Me Mrs. K . . .

I ran into a teenager from church the other day. He greeted me by saying "Hey, Mrs. K.! How ya doin' today?" I was fine until I heard that. You see, I hate, hate, HATE being called Mrs. K. The full Mrs. K##### doesn't thrill me either, but it's better than Mrs. K.

Everyone who knows me IRL knows I am Melinda Maidenname Marriedname. (No hyphen, thank you. Like Anne Morrow Lindbergh or Hilary Rodham Clinton.) Ms. Maidenname is just fine. Ms. Maidenname Marriedname is fine too. I will even tolerate Mrs. Maidenname Marriedname and even Mrs. Marriedname (what I get most often at church from the kids). Mrs. K##### still makes me think of my mother-in-law, not me, but like I said, I tolerate it. It initially made me feel as though I was losing my own identity to be Mrs. K#####, but it is good now to have the same last name as the kids.

But for some reason, since I've had children, teens and some of the neighborhood kids have taken to calling me "Mrs. K." The teens call Matthew "Matt," not Mr. K, so they aren't getting it from that. I really hate it, but I don't know why. Perhaps it reminds me of Happy Days, the 70's TV show. I don't want to be seen as motherly and matronly like "Mrs. C," as Marion Cunningham was known. Or maybe it's just that our name is simple and easy to pronounce. If it was Szczepanek or Dyfydd or something else weird or complicated, I could see shortening it.

Maybe I just need to lighten up.