would still smell like arse. Honestly, I don't like the smell of roses. I like how they look and that they have a pretty name and I like the thorns. But they stink. Maybe my nose is broken. But if it was named Gretel, not Rose, I reckon popularity would slide. Same goes for Canola. They call it that because you can't market rape.

I didn't come here to talk about flowers.

But I do wonder if lilies are poisonous to babies like they are to cats.

So, on the names, I thought we were good for this baby, well if it's a girl. If it comes out a boy won't we all shit ourselves? Hah. But, anyway, girl name, thought we were good, but have had this... niggle... about the middle names.

We were going with Luana Ivy.

Simmy Luana Ivy.

Luana is a combination name of Louise and Anna, family names on his side and my side respectively. Most pointedly though, these are the middles of our sisters. I love my sister more than anything. But what I'd really wanted was to honour my grandfather, best man ever I swear. I'd have married him if I hadn't been a few generations too late and all. And conveniently my grandfather's middle name happens to belong to the same group of names as Obi's maternal grandfather. Two birds, one stone. But none of the name variations seemed to suit Obi, and on the nicely drawn up table of suggestions I made (that he looked at for maybe 30 seconds) he chose Luana.

But a while back it occurred to me that I might truly regret letting it go at that. I don't like the name or think it's pretty. And... grandfathers...
Yesterday at work though I had a real epiphany - would these two young women be honoured to have been thought of in our baby naming process or just plain pissed off that they are sharing a spot with someone they hate? Come on, we all know it's going to be the latter. So I bought that up to Obi and he's like

"Oh, the Frank names were for middles? I thought you were looking at them as a first and I didn't want to change our first!"

Ahh those beautiful moments where you realise he didn't listen to anything you said. Ok then. So he's agreed to go back to the drawing board with me, this late in the game. I wouldn't mind some opinions from you guys if you're keen though. Keeping it all in the cone, and off facebook, of course!

Now, some names I think flow better as a double middle and others I think can stand alone. Obi doesn't care if I give her a second middle or not, you know as long as it's short and not Agnes or something. With Simmy as a place holder for our first name, which is also two syllables but doesn't end in Y, here are my lead contenders:

Simmy Kyra Francis
Simmy Frankie
Simmy Francesca
Simmy Ivy Francene
Simmy Ivy Francie
Simmy Francia

I'm open to other combos or other Francis/Frank style names too if you have suggestions. Yes, I am aware that Francis is the male spelling too, but I really hate Frances, before you point that out lol. Kyra, Ivy or Skye are our most likely second middles if she gets one.

That's enough of that.

House! So we went to the country, saw the solicitor who was infuriatingly disorganized, and found out that he didn't rip us worse than we'd planned for. We came out of it well. Better than I could have hoped.

It went like this. He sat us in his office and went to do some lawyer stuff and on his desk is our massive file. Two huge folders, bursting at the seams and falling apart, towering nearly as tall as his computer screen. I thought Bec was going to cry when she saw it, he breathing went funny. I had the same thought "How are we going to pay for that? All that work and time and effort..." I try to reassure her and make sure my child doesn't eat anything suspicious at the same time. Luckily she was good. Stayed mostly in one place, because she'd found the perfect time to drop a huge smelly turd in her pants. Thanks kid.

So he sits down and tells us he doesn't have the final figure for what he is taking yet, and then ball-parks it on a wide margin. He turns to me, addresses me by my full old name - man that felt weird! - and says "I'm aware that from your share you'd like to allocate some funds to Rebbecca. How much would you like me to make that?" Well fuck, get right to the point why don't you mate? Now Bec and I never discussed how much I owed her because she'd never ask me for money. She's very unassuming, and neither of us are tit-for-tat people. When we go out we don't split bills. Someone pays this time, someone else next time. When we bought stuff for the house (once I was finally in Oz) it was the same way. Some cans of paint here balanced the price of jiprock there in rough guesses. And I was hoping that he'd be able to give me a figure of what my share actually was before I had to decide how much of it I was parting with. So he's looking at me, and Bec's looking at me, and my baby is... pooing.

I'm like "It would be easier if I knew first what your fee was, but roughly I've been thinking 25" and then of course I ask Bec if that's ok and hope to God she's actually honest with me. I can't read her face on it at all. Solicitor man starts throwing numbers at me, that I'm desperately trying to calculate on the fly, when his secretary comes in and gives us a final figure for what his fee is - and thus, what part of all that hard work is ours. Again I'm trying to calculate but my brain won't compute because it seems like he isn't ripping us off at all, and I wasn't prepared for that. The amount we ended up with was ten grand higher than he had ballparked.

Bec still looks like she's going to cry or punch someone, solicitor is smiling and being really nice to us, secretary has stopped to play with the baby who is wafting through the room like a stinky green cloud. It was a bit surreal. Anyway, Maybe I looked like I was going to punch someone too, or puke, or something, because the solicitor starts talking to us about how far we all came together and how much he wanted to punch Ma's boyfriend in the face every time he had to see him. And that was hilarious because we discussed that dickhead as though he was dead, well, one can dream right?

I was really proud of Bec. Once she had done the same calculations as I had and we returned to the topic, she asked me for the funeral money too - just my share of course. Something I hadn't even thought of it was so far back. Gods, years and years of debit. The funeral, the wake, repairs to the house when dickhead was still civil, the court case when he wasn't, the interest on the loan I never had to take to pay him out because she did it for me, the interest on the loan for the money to renovate the house - oh and my half of that too, the cladding, the rates, the insurance, maintaining the lawns and gardens. All these things she covered for me since Ma died in 07. After all of that and shit I probably forgot, she asks me for two grand extra? What the fuck is that? So I told the solicitor to make it 30.

I was, because we are all selfish people, a little worried about what that would leave me. I could see she felt the same - didn't actually know what she had gotten out of everything at the end of it. It was only a small house in the country, not worth much. We sold it for under $200, 000.
Anyway, we hunted for a cafe that was still serving food after 4pm (impossible in the country) and we sat down to just process everything... and pull out a damn calculator! Once I showed her what she had at the end of it all and that it had indeed been worth it we started to feel better... to unravel. I ended up with more than I had wanted for myself (I'd wanted 30 grand for myself, I'd have been happy with that. But I got a bit more) We went and looked at the house one last time, there's a family in there now, it was weird but good.

We're not rich now, of course. But Bec has her unit deposit and her life can move forward. And for me, I see this money as compensation. This is what has to fill the hole of living a life without the safety net of parents. I can never screw up, get divorced, run home to mum. I can't call for help in the middle of the night when the baby gets colic. I can't pick up the phone and tell her I love her. But I can look after this nest egg, and one day when I buy a home it wont be as painful for me as for people who had to save harder, work harder or take bigger loans. And I'm grateful for that. (Well, I will be, when the solicitor actually pays us. Whenever he gets around to that! haha)

My relationship with Bec has improved too, already. Our dynamic is different. It's the start of something beautiful, and I am happy.