Just a quick post because we’ve been thinking for a while about how we use our son’s real name on this blog and since this is the interwebz and all, and he doesn’t have the most ubiquitous name, perhaps we should use an alias instead. Today we just read someone’s post whose pictures got stolen off her blog and used by someone else (creepy and crazy) and we’ve decided to go forward with hiding his real name. Our favorite, and the only one we can both agree on, is “Curly.” Blonde curls aside, there’s also a nice reference to “Oklahoma” there, which makes the musical theatre geeks in us quite happy. Unless of course anyone can come up with a better idea? We’re open to suggestions and thoughts on “Curly.”
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Curly Stats
05/01/2009 - Birth Day! 8 lbs 4 oz/20.8 in
05/14/2009 - 2 weeks. 8 lbs 14 oz
06/02/2009 - 1 month. 10 lbs 5 oz/23 in
06/25/2009 - 2 month appt. 12 lbs 4 oz/23.5 in (75th percentiles)
08/27/09 - 4 month appt. 14 lbs 8 oz/26.25 in (50th% weight, 90th% height)
10/28/2009 - 6 month appt. 16 lbs 5 oz/27.5 in (30th% weight, 85th% height)
01/05/10 - 8 month appt. 18 lbs 4 oz/28.5 in (23rd% weight, 60th% height)
03/04/10 - 10 months. 19 lbs, 13 oz
05/11/10 - 12 months, 1 week. 20 lbs, 12 oz/30.75 in (20th% weight, 85th% height)
08/31/10 - 16 months. 23 lbs, 4 oz/31.25 in (25th% weight, 50th% height)
11/04/10 - 18 months. 23 lbs, 8 oz/31.5 in (20th% weight, 45th% height)
05/2011 - 24 months. 26.5 lbs/33 inches (30% weight, 20% height)
11/2011 - 30 months. 27.5 lbs/35 inches (20% weight, 20% height)
05/2012 - 3 years. 30 lbs/36 inches (25th% for both)
06/2013 - 4 years. 32 lbs/39.5 inches (10% weight, 20% height)- 1 month 2 months 2 years 3 months 3 years 4 months 4 years 5 months 6 months 7 months 8 months 9 months 10 months 11 months 12 months 13 months 14 months 15 months 16 months 17 months 18 months 19 months 20 months 21 months 22 months 23 months Appointments Belly Shots Bradley Meme Newborn Nursery school travel TTC
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1 In Vermillion 
I’ve been thinking about this for awhile and I may do the same thing. But my dread comes with going back and changing his name in every. Single. Post. Will you guys do that? Maybe I don’t have to
Jessie- we just looked it up and it appears that there’s a wordpress plug-in to allow you to do a search and replace on text. Admittedly, we may run into problems since his name is also a word…. And I don’t know if it will work on comments.
I’ve been using both a nickname and a real one but have been thinking about using the nickname exclusively as well.
Nutella – that would save the day! Let me know how it works.
This worries alex a lot. We’ve already started talking about whether or not we’ll use our kids names on the blog. I like curly though.
Jessie- Well it seems like that plug in is only for wordpress.org blogs so it won’t work for us. We can’t find anything that does it. Strawberry has written to customer support to see what they say, we’ll let you know!
I love the name Curly! (and the OK reference- as another musical geek!) I have often worried about using our real names but I think we will just stick with chunk and leave our names alone.
Yeah, I tried to move to wordpress to password-protect picture posts, but I just wasn’t feeling it. Maybe I’ll try again. Also, thought you’d want to know your baby’s name is on your ticker, too 🙂
Curly – cute and fitting!
This now makes me very nervous.
i like the nn “curly” 🙂
and i totally get the urge to make things a bit more private. i used our girls’ real names on a mothering.com forum and regretted it immediately. i posted them on a birth announcement thread and while we were *still in the hospital*, my brother told me he found it and had read some of my other posts (before he felt guilty and quit). omg, i posted all sorts of ttc details there and then had to go back and delete dozens of posts before anyone else found out. point being, when someone you dont want to read your online ramblings finds it, it is a horrible feeling. ugh.
good luck with the retroactive word-replacing. let us know if you figure out how to do that!
In all seriousness, am I missing something? I see lots of people not wanting to say what their kids name are and I’m not sure what someone could do with a child’s first name? Maybe photos could be stolen (which is why I made all my photos private now because of an issue with someone stealing my u/s photo) but the name thing confuses me? You don’t give out your last name so what is the harm in saying his first name?
Yeah, sometimes I think I’m being super paranoid that I only use nicknames, and then I hear about someone else getting their photos stolen or maknig fake FB profiles or something like that and I’m glad I do. I’ve been a bad blogger lately, but I’ve been thinking about watermarking all my photos from here on out, too.
Anyway, all that to say that I don’t think it would be a bad idea to use one for your boy–and the theatre geek in me loves Curly as a nickname, too!
First thing, I got in contact with wordpress customer support and there is unfortunately no way to do a global ‘find and replace’ nor can they do it for anyone. So it’s gotta be manual (ugh). But it’s worth it to us.
Secondly, 2 Mommy’s, we want to be unidentifiable as much as we can. It gives us peace of mind. So for random strangers to even know our son’s first name, including the fact that it’s unique enough not to be in the top 50 most popular names, gives them too much info in our opinion. Also when he is old enough to know about the internet, I don’t want to be a hypocrite and say ‘oh, we never used our real names, but we used yours…” So “Curly” it is!
Curly is awesome. I don’t use my son’s name on Equal Mommy (oooh, I think maybe someone did in comments once), but that has been so hard to remember each time I write. I inevitably mess up and have to go through and delete. I bet if I had a funny/cute nickname to replace his name with, it would be easier. I get bored with “our son,” “our new addition,” “baby,” etc.
I love curly! He needs a cute cowboy hat and a plaid flannel shirt to go with it!!
We don’t use our daughter’s real name because (get this) we’re sort of afraid that some nefarious stranger may recognize her IRL and somehow gain her trust by using her real name. Very, very unlikely to happen, but terrifying enough that we try to stay anonymous.
It’s a creepy online world out there… I’ve been thinking it would be best to move to WordPress just for the password protect thing, but I guess for now, it’s only me and my partner to protect – maybe when we have a baby to protect too… or maybe I should bite the bullet and get it over and done with.
@ 2 Mommy’s – that’s terrible about the u/s pictures. So sad.
I think curly is a super cute blog name for him! The crazies out there are scary. I use pseudonyms for everyone on my blog, but I worry too that it’s not enough protection!
Just a question for all the people out there who have had pics stolen…how did you find out they’d been stolen? I’m a total tech moron and I have no idea how I would even check something like that.
Well for me it was our known donor that stole them off my blog and shared them with another of his recipients. I found out when she told me that he had sent it to her and I was very upset. Had anyone else stolen one of my photos I would have probably never known. Since then I moved my blog, changed the name, used the wordpress “not search engine searchable” feature, and password protected all posts with photos. Ugh, what a pain!
Curly is totally but what about cupcake, a la Nutella and Strawberry baked a cupcake.
If the plugin only works on wordpress.org vs wordpress.com, send me a link, and maybe I can modify the plugin – I’ve written wordpress plugins before, so can’t be too hard – I can at least look at it and tell you if I can modify it. If you have access to the database to run SQL commands – strawberry can also make the changes directly there. The DB schema is well documented.
Thanks, elwing. The problem is there is no way to upload the plugin to wordpress.com. Only wordpress.org has an interface to do that.
Hm..never considered trying to get into the db myself. If I could make the connection, I think I could easily do the changes via sql. Good idea. I’ll go sleuthing.
Part of the reason my blog is private because I got nervous about putting pictures of my kid (only had one at the time) up for the whole creepy world to see. Plus I wanted to use our real names because I want it to be a record of our family life and using nicknames to me takes something away.
Someone above asked what the harm is in using your first names… well, someone who knows of them could google all three names together and find the blog… that happened to me.
I do like Curly and the Oklahoma reference, that’s awesome. 🙂
Shannon, if you google our 3 names nothing comes up (except for our old blog which is now only one post with no photos or anything else) because WordPress has a “no search web” feature. That was one of the big reasons why I switched from Blogger. Love it!
Well I’ve always taken care to not publish our last names, details about where we live (other than to say DC) nor about where we work. But I do see the blog as a story of our lives and it wouldn’t seem to be as genuine to me if we had pretend names or nicknames or used only initials. Although I certainly can tend toward being an anxious person regarding lots of things, I don’t feel anxious about this. Perhaps one day I’ll feel differently but I hope not.
2 Mommy’s – That is a good feature. I didn’t know WP had that. Cool.
You can make a Blogger blog unrecognizable to search engines as well. There’s a listing there under search settings. The problem is that if you haven’t already done so, you will probably already be archived in search engines.
The whole picture thing IS scary. I only post pictures without faces unprotected, but now I’m second-guessing that too.
Just one quick suggestion. You might want to change the title of the page you have where we can See “Curly” Grow from his real name to his new pseudonym. 🙂
Ooh, this is a good idea. I’ve been thinking of doing the same for quite a while and you’ve motivated me anew! Curly is very cute. It’s so easy to Google people – I imagine that an intrepid (or not very intrepid, even) Googler could discover our identities using our son’s name. Plus, there’s his privacy to think about.
The pictures thing IS scary. We post lots of baby pix and I’ve been wondering about hiding his face, too. Sigh, but it’s fun to share.