Issues my parents didn’t have to deal with, No. 283: What to say when your 7-year-old asks, “Can I have a dot-com?” No. 284: How best to consolidate all of our family’s dot-com needs?

For the last year, I’ve been, shall we say, transitioning out of my Nancy Nall identity, not so much shedding it the way a snake does its skin, but adding my married name to the end. I wrote a fairly muddled column about my fairly muddled feelings about all of this for Indianapolis Monthly last year (not online, sorry). I imagine, in my next career incarnations, I’ll be either Nancy Nall Derringer or just Nancy Derringer, and I’m not entirely happy about it, but it is what it is. When Kate came along, it just made sense for all of us to have one name. I didn’t change it legally for a couple more years, but for the last few, N.N.D. has been the name on my paychecks and tax returns if not my byline. I took the fellowship as N.N.D., and because it sounds stupid to introduce yourself with three names, particularly when you haven’t gone hyphenated, these days I’m mostly N.D.

But, of course, this joint is still NN.C. If you can grasp the potential, and entirely unnecessary, problems this poses, you are closer to understanding the modern age than I am.

Kate’s question reminded me of one of those easily put off parental chores I’ve had on my to-do list for a while: Grabbing her .com domain name before a) it somehow becomes a porn site; or b) a starlet with the same name wins a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, thus enabling us to sell it to her at a fat profit. But while I was out there in Verisign/GoDaddy land, I thought, why not shop for the whole family? Alas, derringer.com has been taken by a gun-sales clearinghouse. Dot-org and .net are also gone, one grabbed by a fellow Derringer and the other by someone who lives on Derringer Lane. Derringerfamily is available, but struck me as incredibly dorky. Twoshot.com — a derringer is a two-shot weapon — sounded much cooler, but alas, it was taken. Dot-org and .net are available.

I stopped at Kate’s name. She won’t be setting up a site there for years; but it’s in our pocket, for now. In the meantime, she’ll continue to play the Flash games at nick.com and her mother will content herself with playing on sites like Making Over Mona. I think I went a little overboard on the botox.