On the subject of acronyms

Being a recovering IT nerd and having a wife in the military, my life is suffused with acronyms. Everyone more or less assumes I'm speaking Mandarin when I check the ARP cache to match their MAC to their IP, or TELNET to their SMTP to figure out if their POP is working. When my wife explains that her friend left an LHA before his PRD to go on IA, and therefore wasn't around for the PRT, people figure it's all vital to national security (while those who know better realize she's talking about sit-ups).

We've thought all along our lives had too much of that shit. But oh, then we started trying to have kids, and entered another whole realm of acronymity, for lack of a better word.

First, we found ourselves up close and personal with what I call "Infertility Culture," or as the residents call themselves, "TTCers." This is a group of people who can reveal the innermost secrets of their husbands' testicles in the anonymity of the Internet, but literally sprint in and out of their fertility clinic lest they encounter another human in person. (I just realized I sound like I'm being hard on these folks -- I don't mean it. I don't know how we kept our own good spirits during those years, other than having each other).

Then we entered the world of adoption, specifically international adoption. I don't know if adoption necessarily needs all the acronyms that come with it, or if the agencies just started using them to make all the former TTCers more comfortable.

Now that we're trying to prepare for Ripley's inevitable arrival, we're finding that every parenting "tribe" out there, no matter how simple sounding the topic they've organized around, has their own acronym-heavy language. Want to learn about the options for cloth diapers or baby carriers (Sorry, "babywearing") from the people who know them best? Well, plan on having to breach every topic's impenetrable wall of acronyms.

Apparently, it really necessary to spend hours of confusion learning acronyms before learning about an environmentally responsible way of capturing the little one's shit. Look, I'm used to getting PAID to learn stupid acronyms. No wonder people just say "screw it" and buy Pampers; I was almost at that point myself.

When I started doing this research, the first couple message board posts I sent my wife came back with a simple reply: "These people scare me." Well, that's OK, I told her. "We don't have to be the crazy people. Just learn from the crazy people."

So, the point of this long winded post is to make a promise to my readers, present and future.

Whereas, my (as-yet unpublished) manifesto says that this is NOT a parenting obsession blog,

But I'm certainly going to end up discussing all manner of obsessive acronym-ready topics,

and Whereas, I would like to think that someday what I'm writing here could be useful to other neophytes,

I promise to define each and every acronym I use, in each and ever post.

So if my experiment in cloth diapers works out, you won't arrive here one day to decipher a subject line that says, "OMG I LUV CD," and when I talk about the adoption you won't have to tolerate a post about how we finally have our LID after going DTC last month -- at least not until after I've told you what a Log In Date and Dossier To China mean.

When I break this promise, I expect -- nay, demand -- that you, both my readers, leave a comment that says "John, what the FUCK does that mean?" Thank you.