putapuredukes?

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the name/title of our blog, "Put Up Your Dukes," is obviously a play on our last name and the idea that sometimes we are going to have to stick up our fists and fight for this fuller life that we so badly want.

but you may have noticed that the web address, putapuredukes,  is spelled differently than the blog title. here's the story of that.

long before i ever met jesse he would joke that he was going to name his child "Puta Pure" thereby making his full name sound just like the saying, "put up your dukes." he squished it all together and made this his AOL instant messenger screen name, which was ironically one of the very first methods by which we communicated when we first met and started liking each other. we actually saved some of those first chats from 2004 and they are muy hilarious.

we started the blog when i was about 14 weeks pregnant. it was just a run-of-the-mill, update that grandparents kind of baby and pregnancy blog with no higher aspirations. the title of it was actually not "put up your dukes," at all, but rather, "jesse and keight plus one." gag me a million times over that i used a play on the gosselins' trainwreck. forgive me. and bonus points if you've been here since then and remember that name.

i knew blogger lets you change the title of the blog, but not the web address. in case we had more kids (we did) or i got a creative bone and stopped ripping off john and kate (i did), i didnt want to make the address jesseandkeightplusone.com forever. i found myself  really wanting to make the address putapuredukes.com in homage to jesse's clever pun from the days of yore.

but i was hesitant because "puta" is actually a not-very-nice word for a woman in spanish.  i definitely didn't want a blog that could be translated in any way to mean "pure bitch dukes," since it was a just baby blog to begin with and we didn't know at that point if we were having a girl or a boy. that would not be a cute, punny name for a blog  al about a baby girl. reluctantly i went ahead and named it that because i loved the play on words and assumed most people reading it would already like us and wouldn't go there and bully us about the possible translation.

now i am so glad that we went with that because it goes along perfectly with the "put up your dukes" theme of fighting for something better. i (keight) do the vast majority of the writing here so the blog is kind of my baby.  the blog has grown and morphed into this not-so-baby-blog sort of thing now. it's not so much all about the kids anymore, but more about where i am, so if anyone was going to get the puta label put on them, it would be me. i can live with that.

and the really cool thing with how the whole blog naming decision turned out is that a huge part of my walk with jesus has been letting him soften my heart and show me that being a prideful hardass isn't what he wants for me. so a daily fight that i have to put my dukes up against actually is the tendency to act like a pure bee-yatch. fighting this particular fight has been the defining part of my relationship with both my savior and my husband.