What’s in a Name?
Hygiene Chronicles | May 30As I continue making my way through the blogosphere, I come across and connect new blogs to my own site all the time. Recently, I’ve added a new dad who I really enjoy reading. His blog, Two Okapis, is named after his twins. On his web site, Papa Okapis describes how he & his wife came up with the nicknames. That got me thinking how most parents create names for the impending child during the pregnancy so they don’t have to keep referring to the baby as “it”.
When we first were expecting, we were elated. The four of us would read up on ‘baby things’ and email back and forth. “We should feel it kick in this month. We can hear its heartbeat at this week. It will stop making me throw up in the second trimester.” OK, that was only one of us saying that last statement, but after a couple of weeks, we realized a nickname had to be created for this growing baby.
We called him Gus.
Back in 2002, there was a TV show on Showtime called Queer as Folk. Perhaps not on everyone’s radar screen, it was popular with us every Sunday evening. It dealt with a group of gay friends in Pittsburgh. In the premier episode, there was a lesbian couple that was pregnant and their friend Brian was the father.
Brian was a total stud who was successful in both his business and personal life. He was good-looking, had lots of money, drank like a fish and scored more times than Paris Hilton. He turned heads everywhere. Both of us being gay is where the comparison ends.
The show opened with the lesbians giving birth to a boy and introducing him to Brian. “This is your son, Gus.”
And thus, our ‘Gus’ was christened. After our son was born, it took about two months for all of us to correctly call him by his given name. Too often, we’d refer to him as Gus, but eventually the name disappeared.
I will always love the name Gus because it reminds me of an innocent time when four soon-to-be parents wondered how they would fare at raising a child. Gus has turned out pretty well so far.
Did you have any nicknames for your child before they were born?
The Bean was named such ‘cuz she looked like a bean (lima, pinto, black, etc) in the first ultasound pictures. We still call her The Bean and she’s 2 1/2
I’ll ‘fess up… one of my husband’s nicknames for me is Pikachu (I really watched Pokemon cartoons as an adult and found it hugely entertaining!), so when I was pregnant with our first child, we called the baby Pichu (the younger version of a Pikachu). When I was pregnant with our second, we just referred to “the baby” (so as not to confuse our daughter), and then by his name, once we found out we were having a boy.
My oldest daughter was Pica. This was because my wife showed me an ‘actual size’ pic in a baby development book, and I said, ‘that’s just a pica.’
A pica, for the uninitiated, is about 1/6 of an inch. It’s a unit of measurement traditional to printing.
And it stuck, as a name, until we knew gender and picked out a proper name.
We called our gal Peanut. Definitely on the same wavelength as the Bean’s Dad.
We had to have a gestational name for the gal, since we were not telling anyone her real name until she popped out. I knew someone would say they didn’t like the name (Ada) and neither of us wanted to hear about it. Once a kid is born, a kid’s name could be Glpmmpf and people would coo “ohh, such a sweet name!”.
We called ours Thing 1 and Thing 2 for a while - before we knew the sex of the twins. Unfortunately, my wife wasn’t for making the nicknames stick.
We are in the hope of having one, so right now we’ve settled on version 2.0 as the nickname. Yeah we’re a bit geeky.
We’re calling ours Bernard. We reached 37 weeks yesterday!
We haven’t had a name for him yet–and at 34 weeks, I don’t think that one is coming for him before he arrives. We haven’t talked about it, but I think that it’s partially because we don’t want to either get stuck on a name or jinx a name somehow. It was nice to learn his sex though, so we can at least refer to him as “the boy” instead of “the baby” or “it.” Hm. Maybe we should call him “Baby It,” as in “Cousin It.” Yeah, probably not.
We actually call (ed) the kids by their names. It was difficult because We keep the names secret from everyone so no one steals it and so no one can/could tell us how horrible our names are.
We called ours Hambone and Randall.
I’m not kidding. We really called them that.
Thanks for the shout out! Another reason we named, and kept, Okapis, was we didn’t want anyone calling them “The Twins” or anything like that. Plus, it’s not a bad conversation starter. ;-)
We adopted our first child. Then, when we astonishingly discovered that my wonderful wife was pregnant, we were really unprepared for the whole “what do you call IT?” question.
So we called her MiMi. Can’t remember why. But we enjoyed it so much that we actually named her Miranda Michelle, thinking that, then, MiMi would stick. Alas, the girl we got is no MiMi, and the nickname didn’t last to the end of the first week. (She did, however, turn out to be a GREAT Miranda! I can’t imagine calling her anything else.)
We called our son [currently The Voice] Vil Vil after we found out he was going to be a boy. It was a spin on his real name [we decided against Shatner, or Dafoe], but Vil Vil was actually also the name of an octopus in his mommy’s dream, and that’s really what did it.
With our first daughter we went with the oh so orginal “Baby”. Our second was simply “him”. Were we all certain I was having a boy that everyone just called the baby him. Except my daughter she insisted she was having a little sister….. turns out she was right.
A couple of years before we had our son we spent a month on adventures in Asia. You know the regular stuff, climbed mountains, treks in the rainforrest, etc. One necessary destination over there was the bathroom, which is called “Tandas”. We joked and said that would be a nice name for a kid, unless of course we visited Malaysia again. So our sonds nickname turned out to be Tandas. Things worked out so well and we have been so fortunate that we are continuing with the “Tandas” theme for baby number two (due in August). She’s called “Tanditas” which basically means “a small Tandas” in Spanish.
For our first child we did talk an awful lot of “IT” which i didn’t think was very nice so we are trying to use a name even if it may sound silly
AD
My family did this alot. There was Cletus (the Fetus), Willis and Arnold, Oscar and Meyer.
[…] It started with DadBloggers including me in their list of Daddy bloggers. My first post, about how we came up with the nickname “Okapis” for our children, was made live yesterday. Ironically, as that was happening - though without knowing it, Steve of The Hygiene Chronicles decided to refer to that nickname in his post on The BlogFathers to ask about what other parents have called their babies while they were pregnant. […]
I don’t know how we started calling her “Little Booger” before she was born, but it stuck… Right through to now six years later where we have just shortened it to “Boog”
We are refering to our daughter as “La Chispa” which roughly translates to “spark”
He was The Peeps. When he was born, 16 weeks early, one of his eyes was open. It was supposed to still be fused shut. He would peek out at us from the isolette and we would tell him to stop peeping and start sleeping (REM sleep grows brains). Eventually he just became The Peeps, or Peeps, or Peeper, or Peep-a-Leep.
We actually didn’t come up with our own nickname. As soon as we found out we were having a baby everyone else started calling it “Baby Brown.” That kinda stuck.
I was reading a lot of baby name books when I was pregnant with #1 and one day I was sitting on the couch next to my best friend while reading one of the books. She grabbed it and flipped it open to the “K” section and started laughing. She had found “Knud”, a traditional Swedish (I think it was Swedish; it was nearly ten years ago!) name for a boy (we knew he was a boy). So we started calling him “Knud”. It didn’t stick; once he was born we settled on Christopher.
When I was pregnant with #2, we asked a then-two-and-a-half-year-old Christopher was his sister’s name should be (we knew we were having a girl). He looked thoughtful for a moment and then said, “Beep.” She was “Beep” throughout, but once again, after she was born we started calling her by her name. Sort of. Her name is Sophia, and we call her Sophie, but when she started talking she pronounced it “Soshie” so we called her that for a while. Now we all call her Soph.
We called ours “Two.” (As in, “I’m eating for Two.”)
Before we knew the sex we went with ‘ZEUS’ - it was an all powerful non-sexually oriented name for us. . . yeah, I know he was a dude, but I’ve always thought god was a woman. Mine at least.
Thus far we’re using Archimedes or the Tadpole. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if it sticks or not.
Our oldest was Bean. WHich we still called her until she turned 4 and told us not too. Our youngest we called Squishy, which faded within a month. I just couldn’t call my babies IT. For some reason giving them nicknames made them more real.
well my husband is a hindu and i am a christian… and we didnt want names that were associated with either so we called the baby Ali till he was born… after that we christened him with his actual name.
My brother-in-law called his first Jochen after Jochen Hecht, a former Blues player. She still answers to Jochen.
I had always joked that I was going to name my children by stacking the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and the Bible on top of each other flipping and pointing. And so, we called our baby Agamemnon while in utero. However, the joke was on us as we had no middle name picked out for a boy and ended up with Oliver Agamemnon.
Like suburban misfit, we found our nicknames in the baby book.
Our firstborn is Alexander, called Xander at home, though he prefers the nickname given by a teacher — Bosco. But before he was born, we called him Herkomer. (And for a while afterward, too.)
Our second son is Nicholas, who refuses to answer to any nickname but Nick. But before he had a choice, the little fetus was called Ethelbert.
These names expressed our sense of amusement regarding people’s opinions about our ideas for baby names. It really confused those who thought that we were serious!