The Heusens

Here's a recap of the last 3 months of Ashlyn's pregnancy. She's halfway through week 16 right now. Let's see how she grows!

Labels: belly, first trimester, Pregnancy, sympathy weight

Posted by Kris at 7:56 PM | Permalink | Comments

Hi everyone,

Greetings from Kris and Ashlyn, the "Heusen" family! This blog will show some of our trials and tribulations in the next year as we deal with pregnancy and pop out a baby, all while writing a thesis and looking for academic jobs.

For those of you who don't know, let me tell the story of why this blog is called The Heusens. When we got married, Ashlyn didn't want take my last name because she's standing up to the "patriarchal tyrrany" and all that jazz, plus she has had her last name all throughout her academic career. I didn't want to take hers, because that would flat-out make me a eunuch. Hyphenating is such a pain -- why waste everyone's breath with an extra name? But keeping your own name after marriage doesn't really signify that you two have been really united.

So we thought about both of us taking a new name, where our last names were somehow combined. But it sounded bad to combine the first part of one name with the last of the other. So we had the idea of alternating letters from our last names, and we ended up with Heusen.

We were seriously considering changing our names, even though everyone we talked to thought we were crazy. Ultimately, we never got around to changing them, because even though it's easy for a wife to change her name after marriage, changing the husband name is such a hassle, requiring a visit to the courts and costing hundreds of dollars. But that doesn't stop us from thinking of ourselves as the Heusens!

Labels: Introduction, names

Posted by Kris at 7:36 PM | Permalink | Comments