I know. I have five nieces, four with names that end in A. Olivia, Aria, Lida, and Carolina. Goodness.

Sometimes, in rare instances, a parent does manage to pick a name that never becomes popular and is always considered a bit odd. My mom picked a weird name. I am 35 and in that entire time, I have only met one other person with my name and that was in passing. And I tell people all the time that although I love my…

Our adoption agency has a similar class. They also have a class specifically for dads to learn how to do their daughter’s hair, no matter what their ethnic background is. Also, one of my sister-in-laws has adopted two bi-racial girls and asked a friend who owns a local hair salon to teach her how to do their hair. She…

I’m not sure what accounts for all those numbers, but I will say that there are a number of countries out there who have a horrible justice systems and do not lock up people who commit horrible crimes, which is what inflates that percentage in the US. I just watched a documentary the other day about a number of…

The year my mom started complaining about “having” to cook everything at Thanksgiving, Easter, and Christmas (which she totally didn’t. We all help), I moved the festivities to my brother’s house and arranged it pot-luck style. I don’t think she liked that very much because she hasn’t complained since and we are back…

I was one of those people. I was raised in an extremely conservative Evangelical home that believed the Bible should be taken literally. It took a very long time for me to break free from it. The reason is simple: Indoctrination. Constant indoctrination. Every day we read the Bible. When we I watched movies and they…

My husband and I are in the midst of adopting a teenager and I actually feel the same way. I have no friends with teenagers and feel this immense pressure to find other parents of teens, thinking that they will have some kind of ‘fount of wisdom’ that I have not been privy to yet. Or at least, will be there to offer…

My boss told me that two of the questions I asked during my interview were not only really good, but also made her and my other boss think. The first was to just ask about their management styles. I framed it in a, “What can I expect from you as a manager?” kind of way. The other was when I expressed the importance of…

My company’s solution (Publishing btw) is to change all salaried employees who make under $47,477 to hourly. As an already hourly employee who is absolutely not allowed to work any overtime, not even .1 minutes, I forsee this not going over well with some of our editors. Our boss is pretty awesome in that she doesn’t…

Mr. Bean and I are in the process of adopting a teenager. We know a lot is going to change once we have a kid in the house and we are already rather introverted people. We have already approached most of our good friends and have had very open discussion with them about it. Hey, things are going to change and we need…

My sister-in-law tried the same kids-won’t-change-my-life thing and she was in for a rude awakening. While most of her friends were in college, she had a kid. And then another and another and another. And despite her willingness to drag her kids all over the place and be a social butterfly, it took her a long time to…

I had a young friend who was being sexually groomed by her pastor for years while she was a teenager. He flirted with her and kissed her and told her all the “dirty” things he wanted to do to her. Then he did some of them. He talked about leaving his wife. She wanted love and acceptance, but it took her years before…

The weirdest bit isn’t the church part...it’s the nursery. The kids are in those party rooms and children’s church is in a different theater. I feel like it is a lame attempt to be hip.

I wasn’t taught these things. I grew up in Assemblies of God churches, then as an adult went to a Vineyard church, a community church, and then two Nazarene churches (I have moved a lot) and at no point did anyone say, hey...Paul didn’t know anything about Jesus’ life other than death and resurrection and maybe not…

I grew up in some serious Evangelical fundamentalist shit and it was always taught that Paul knew all about Jesus and his life, and the gospels were contemporary accounts (or close to it) so they did exist, we just don’t have the earliest copies.

I lived a very similar existence, although I had the added bonus of homeschooling. I remember one girl specifically who I prosthelytized to at the age of eight. I led her to Christ and then gave her a Bible. Her mother was furious. She marched over to our house, handed us the Bible, and told me that I was not welcome…

The movie theater near our house has a church that meets in it on Sunday mornings. They still show a few movies during that time though. My husband and I got a laugh when we walked past all these church folk on our way to watch Deadpool in the theater next to the “sanctuary”.

This is the same for me. Church several times a week, super fundamentalist. We were homeschooled, my mom wore the long dresses and hair, and we didn’t own a television because it was evil. And I was just thinking about that end times stuff today and how we were told that we may not even graduate high school because…

I work for a publisher and my work is so vague about the dress code that it confuses me. For example our COO wears a suit and tie everyday, while one of our editors wears torn cargo shorts, chucks, and a t-shirt. Normally, I go got business casual, occasionally “dressing down” with jeans and a blouse or up with a…

The worst reveal I have seen involved a friend and his wife. Over the past five years, she has gained almost 200 pounds, making her rather obese. Not knocking heavier people, that’s just the fact of the situation. For her reveal she had pictures of herself taken at a park picnic area, surrounded by mounds of food…