What's in a name?

So now that I'm a blogger, I'm supposed to come up with cute nicknames for my family members, right? Uh-huh. I know plenty of bloggers who do this well, (my favorites are over at Parenting, Illustrated With Crappy Pictures), but the whole thing reeks a bit to me of the Mommy website message board habits of calling your children **DSS9mosheartheartheartheart**  (dear sweet son, 9 months old, heart heart heart heart). Yeah, no.

But we'll try it, if only to give my poor kids a little privacy. For all this blog's lofty purposes, it's also bound to include some adventures and anecdotes of the tiny people (and their minions) with whom I hang out all day -- and surely some of them will be the type of anecdotes that, once they're aware enough to realize it, my kids might be embarrassed that I'm releasing into the blogosphere.

Tim gets to just stay Tim. It's the only name that fits him. My parents can be Grampa and Gramma, obviously. The boys ... for simplicity's sake, let's say Big and Little.

This works because I find myself calling them Big Brother and Little Brother a lot of the day anyway. It's just so much easier than sifting through the pile of names in my brain. Every parent does that, I know. It gets a little worse in our house because somehow we managed to give both kids and the dog (who we shall call Pig!) names with the same number of syllables and major consonant. They just naturally flow together.

But then the other day I did this:

Me, to Little, who is practicing his magic art of Fussing As Soon As Mommmy Starts Eating: "Dog nghhh Cat gahhh BABY!"

To which Tim replies: "That sounds like the name of a very disturbing TV show."