Thursday, May 21, 2009

Who are you again?

Today Alexander went to one of his special one-day programs through the county- an Under the Sea adventure. He had SUCH a good time. Afterwards, I noticed that he was still wearing his name tag and suggested that we take it off, since we didn't need it anymore. His response? "But then PopPop will just call me Matt!"

I had to post this just to make PopPop laugh, even though for others it will require an explanation. Matt is my brother, and PopPop is, of course, my dad. PopPop often mistakenly calls Alexander "Matt" for the same reason that I joke that Jack's name is "Xan-Jack," and for the same reason that I learned to respond to "Karen" when I spent summers with my grandparents (Karen was my mother's name). For some reason, we parents and grandparents just can't seem to remember our (grand)kids' names! Senility is setting in, I guess. I found that I never messed up my kids' names until Jack was old enough to be caught doing no-nos, at which point I would start to blurt out the first name that came to my mouth- Alexander or Xander, stop halfway through, and switch to Jack- creating his new "you're in trouble" name: "Xan-Jack." Alexander gets the typical addition of the middle name, "ALEXANDER MATTHEW!" but Jack gets, "XAN-JACK!" Who are you again?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

My FIL has 4 sons and 10, count 'em 10, grandkids. I'll let you guess how often he mixes up names :)

Duh..Duh..Duh..PopPop said...

Pity my poor father. All five of us kids had names starting with "D" (David, Diane, etc). When he'd try to call for one of us, it would usually start out "Duh..Duh..Duh..."

Matt Neimeyer said...

Maybe it's all my fault... maybe I scarred our darling father somehow...

Nah... I was an angel. It's got to be the senility.