One of my pet peeves is parents who are creative with the spelling of their children's names. As a teacher, I often wonder if they are being "creative" or if they are just terrible spellers. One year, as I scanned the class lists of our school, I saw Ariel (Little Mermaid years) spelled at least a dozen different ways. Now surely all those parents weren't just being cute.

Names are personal. That may sound like a contradiction to the previous paragraph, but you should be able to read a name and know what it is, or upon hearing it spoken, not have to ask how to spell it. The reason I'm on this rant is that I sang at a funeral for a woman today whose name was pronounced "Delia", but was spelled as if the person filling out the birth certificate had a seizure while writing it. Her own son said he'd spent his life spelling it out for people.

When we named our girls, we went short and sweet. I'm hoping they keep that in mind someday, when they're naming my grandchildren!!