For most of the day, I thought the highlight of my Monday would be the curling marathon on ESPN2. I mean, come on. It’s Monnnnndaaaaay. Not only do I not have to think about what to do on a Monday, I don’t even have to think very hard while I’m doing it. I’m paying bills all day long, usually. If there’s a ballgame on TV, it certainly doesn’t distract me from my Monday work.

Curling is a little more distracting, mostly because I don’t get to see it very often. I’m lucky if it’s available once a year, so a three-hour block in the middle of a Monday afternoon is like an oasis in a desert of droning fax machines and groaning copiers. It’s a good thing they showed all of this curling at once, because it took me a while to get back into the rhythm of the game.

Sometimes I wish I were Canadian.

But as it happens, curling wasn’t the highlight of my day after all. I had a phone call from Tammy this afternoon, and as soon as she told me she slipped, I knew what she meant. When she said, “It’s out,” I knew she wasn’t talking about the baby. She was talking about the baby’s name.

For reasons of their own, Tammy and David have been keeping the name of their daughter, who will be born in September, a secret. That is, they’ve been keeping the name a secret, not from everyone but from the people who care most, the members of the family who are closest to them. They’ve told outsiders, but mostly (I think) just to torture the rest of us. Yes, it’s a little sadistic, but as I said, they had their reasons.

But this baby has had a name for two and a half weeks, since they learned she was a girl. Because they’ve been using the name in private, it was bound to leak out sooner or later. Tammy was shopping with Suzanne this afternoon and the name just slipped out in the middle of a sentence. She gasped and hoped she hadn’t been heard, but the genie stayed out of the bottle. (And no, the name isn’t Jeannie, although it’s a perfectly fine name.)

Our little girl will be called Kylie. Kylie Elizabeth. (She has a last name, too, but we already knew what that was going to be.)

It’s good to be able to call Kylie by her name. It doesn’t mean she wasn’t loved when we just called her “the baby,” but it does make her seem a little more vivid. A lot of families have babies, but not as many have babies named Kylie, who will have three big brothers, just in case any of those other babies, with or without names, had any ideas.

Not that she wouldn’t be able to take care of herself, of course. The big brothers are just a backup. In fact, I’m hoping she grows up healthy and strong and maybe some day makes the U.S. Olympic curling team. But only if she wants to.