About

Where did the blog title come from?

Sometimes I forget that the rest of the world doesn’t get word play on classic children’s books instantly. When we started the blog, shortly after we found out that I was pregnant, I was looking for a blog title I was trying to find something A) not super cheesy or cliche B) that didn’t involve our names in any way and C) was a reference to children’s literature.

Pat the Bunny is a real children’s book written by Dorthy Kundhart in 1940. Beyond just being one of the very few children’s books that continues to stay in print and is a bestseller nearly 70 years later, it was also one of the first interactive children’s books. If you haven’t seen the book, each page of the story contains an interactive task (the most famous of which is patting the fur on the bunny’s stomach).

While I love the children’s book, patting the bunny’s belly is also strangely similar to the much more disturbing phenomenon where complete strangers feel as though they have an inherent right to touch a pregnant woman’s belly. So, I substituted belly for bunny and then put a picture of Pat the Bunny in the header of the blog.

So (Don’t) means that while patting the bunny is completely fine, patting the belly is not. My apologies to those who were confused. Even though the baby has now arrived, we like the title so much, it’s going to stay.

Why do you call the baby Al Capone?

The short answer is that we had a poll for people to vote for nicknames for the baby after he was born. Due to widespread voter fraud, we opted to declare the result invalid and name him after the man who encouraged people to “vote early and vote often.”

The longer answer is that we have opted to not use our real names on the blog for security reasons. Most of our readers are just friends and family and already know our real names. However, we also have blogging friends, fellow cloth diapering parents, and others who follow our blog. While I realize that it if someone really wanted to track down our real identities, they probably could, not using our real names makes it just a little bit harder. Hopefully, using alias will keep complete strangers from being able to talk to Al Capone as if they are friends (should they ever meet them) and it also keeps Google from inadvertently sending students who are looking for my course webpages to a blog entry with pictures of me in labor.

Is Al Capone’s real name Boutros?

No. Rakicy’s colleagues called Al Capone Boutros before he was born because we kept the name and gender a secret. Boutros actually won the nickname poll, but was later dropped in favor of Al Capone in honor of the voter fraud. Since “the-baby-formerly-known-as-Boutros” would take for every to type and TBFKAB just looks like gibberish, we just transitioned to calling him Al Capone, but I haven’t changed all of the older posts.

Where can you find stuffed hedgehogs or gerbils?

This question is one of the most popular keywords that lands people on our blog. I never realized how many people were actually seeking out stuffed gerbils, but the answer is IKEA. They do not sell them on their website, you have to go to the actual store.