Students and Their Names

Two things happened concurrently today that both deserved blog posts. The first is that I got up the nerve to fill out the student loan paperwork. I'll be a student as well as a mom, teacher, and job-hunter (and hopefully employee sometime soon!). It's nice to know that if I am "totally and permanently disabled, or dead" that my husband is not responsible for paying the balance of my student loan... assuming he can provide adequate documentation of my death or disability. I posted this on both Google+ and Facebook, and got a number of amusing responses. For instance, the aforementioned husband claims that he won't declare me dead in order to avoid paying the student loan; he'll just take out risky loans and collect Social Security in my name, whilst keeping my mummified body in the attic.

We don't actually have an attic, so it's safe to say he's joking.

And my friend Chris, aka Yer Humble Host of Chez Fred, suggested in his own humorous way that Laston should simply "provide evidence" of my death by dropping my lungs onto a table in front of the loan officer.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I also got into a discussion of name origins on Google+, on a stream thread about Farscape, because one of my compatriots on that thread has a daughter with the middle name Aeryn, from a character on that show. I recalled that when I was pregnant with Abby, we watched a lot of Farscape. One or the other of us objected to spelling Abby's middle name "Aeryn", because half the reason we chose "Abigail" was so her name would be easy to spell and pronounce, without being the Jennifer or Michael of her generation (a bazillion in her classes at school), like her parents. I don't know the entire origin of Leanna Rose, but I believe it's a mashup of her grandmothers' names.

And Elizabeth Robin was chosen after much consultation of web sites and friends and so forth; we liked Elizabeth because it went with Leanna and Abigail on the Classic Old-Fashioned Girls' Names front, and it's highly nick-nameable (which is why she went through Ellie and Bethy before we decided Lizzy just suited her). Her middle name was a bit harder though; we wanted something nature-related to go with the Rose and Erin of her sisters, but none of what we encountered seemed quite right... until I just got inspired with Robin. It suits her as much as "Lizzy" does; she's like a bright little bird, constantly poking her little beak into everything. And with her nickname of Lizzy, her initials are the same as her biggest sister's - and their dad's.