Middle names

Have you ever noticed that when someone close to you gets upset with you, they tend to use your middle name in addition to your first name? My mother would call me "Cynthia L*****!"

I hate the name "Cynthia." I detest my middle name even more. That's why it doesn't appear very often ANYWHERE.

I don't mind the name "Cindy," which is what I went by for the first 14 years of my life. Then during my freshman year in high school, I went through a small identity crisis and changed the "y" to an "i"...oh yeah, that made a HUGE difference. Cindi. Yep, my identity is all mine now.

My husband is someone else who prefers not to divulge his middle name too often. He's so kind though...here at home we tease him about it, but he never teases me back about mine.

Not liking our middle names, we decided to give our sons middle names that they could live with and hopefully might even like. So far it works for them. Neither one has complained about their middle names.

We even have given Pepina and Marina middle names. Okay, now I'm sure that we're not the ONLY people in the world who give their pets middle names. It took a little while to come up with something to go with Pepina, and we eventually settled on something simple. For Marina, I wanted to use my maternal grandmother's middle name, which is italian in heritage.

Joey thinks that giving a pet a middle name is complete and utter nonsense. In fact, he is set in his ways and likes to be a nonconformist. He calls both cats...."Cat." The weird part is, they look at him when he says that. They never look at the rest of us when we say "Cat" but they sure look at him.

Yes, when we're trying to really get the cats' attention, we use their first AND middle names. It's the way I was raised. I can't help it.

Pepina Marie and Marina Concetta, being cute as can be.