Calling our children names

When Frost was a baby we used to call him Piggy. He was very large for his age - at about 97th percentile by 4 months - and nursed all the time for hours. In fact, Frost was the benchmark by which I measured Wren and thought he was starving when he nursed for only 15-20 minutes at a time (and still gained weight.) We stopped calling him Piggy when he was almost 3 and noticed our Friends starting to use it too. I could see him hating us when he was 8 years old and being called Piggy in public.

My parents called me "sausage", "monkey" and "cooks". I think these are names born of the British Empire (the English love sausage). I never knew where cooks came from until I read Alexander Fuller's books and learned that it was a pet name for children in her family and derived from a shona word. I wish I had bookmarked that page but I shall have to find it again. Perhaps Dad picked it up from his family in Zimbabwe.

So with all this family history I have been thinking about what we call Wren. Josh started calling him "grunty" when he was born because he grunted all the time. This name disurbed me a little because I worried that it was a symptom of his cardiac defect and so it was a bit like Naming him to Be This Way Forever. I want him to stop grunting - an he has almost done so although he is a famously noisy nurser producing splendid guzzling and gulping sounds. Still, he was Grunty for a few months.

Wrenling and Wrenlicle are easy off the tongue and Frost and I use them all day as pet names. Josh also calls him Wrenly sometimes (reminding me of Renly in the Game of Thrones). I think the ling and licle endings are cute diminuatives and follow in the family of Frostling although Wrenlicle is associated in my mind with barnacle (as in you latch on so hard you are a little barnacle.)

Then there are the less public pet names that are usually only between the sleep deprived mother and her infant. I often call him Boo Boo (I think that Taren was called Boo for a while). I have no idea why this name came up. Perhaps, as ma-ma and da-da are common first sounds in any language Boo is a common first word for mothers reduced to a monosylabic state.

However, the phrase that rolled off my tongue this morning at diaper change and was the impetus for this post was:

"Are you my poopsicle? [checking diaper] No? Are you my leaning tower of pee-za?"

The tragedy of the situation was that I thought this very witty. I have been calling Wren a poopsicle regularly but the pee-za bit really made it Nobel Prize for Literature material [among my few remaining dendrites of course] and I had to show it off.

So, Wren is still without a nickname that sticks. Frost calls him "Cutey", "Mr Love" and "The nicey baby." "and that's it" he says. Its spring break and I have no independent existance so "that's it" I guess.