A reader kindly suggested that it might be of help if I offered a key to the motley crew I refer to with various aliases (which are intended, as you might imagine, not to be cute but rather to provide family members a wee fig leaf’s worth of privacy). For the purpose of this blog, I tend to think of these folks as good-natured stand-ins for family members everywhere, and therefore not so very important in the particular. I needed a kindly reader to suggest that, all the same, I do tend to refer to them frequently, and the context doesn’t always clarify who’s who. So:

The beloved: my ever so significant significant other, the heavenly body around which my world has orbited since the mid-nineteen-nineties. Stalwart, feisty, courageous, musical.

The lil’ monkey: our girlchild. Born in fall 2004, stampeding and waltzing through her toddlerhood with mad brilliance. One of my several most favorite people on the planet.

The lil’ peanut: our boychild. Born early on in 2007, already as of this writing (late summer that year) utterly indispensable to each of us in this little pack. Charisma to burn, drives me crazy with love for him.

The KIABIL: The Know-It-All-Brother-In-Law. Usually I try to write it out whenever I reference him, before resorting to the acronym. But for the AO (Acronym Oriented) that can sometimes be hard to remember. We live upstairs from him and his family (which features the downstairs girl cousin and downstairs boy cousin).

The Mother OutLaw My beloved’s mom. To her immense delight, I call her my mother “outlaw” as vs. my mother “inlaw,” what with my beloved’s and my love existing outside the law as of the moment simply because, to my immense delight, she’s a radicalesbian from way back. Lucky break for me.

The Special aunt, special uncle, and special cousins: Our special kin. Special Uncle is what we call our donor chum, and his whole family is commensurately special. In this post I sketch out our relationship to one another.

Many other people are in our extendo-family, but I seem not to fall to nicknaming or aliasing them. Yet.

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page last updated: 07.20.08