Pregnant paws
It’s totally mad that while in the throes of arguably one of the least sane periods of our lives, namely gestation, we also have to make one of the most important decisions of our lives: naming a baby. I revisited the baby-name list compiled during my last pregnancy and realised that Yer Man, my firstborn, had dodged not one, but about eight, name-bullets.
There was a name on there that was basically a portmanteau of ‘anus’ and ‘penis’. What were we thinking? I’m giving myself the the benefit of the doubt due to the aforementioned Pregnancy Crazy, but I don’t know what Himself’s and Herself’s excuses were. They were the Naming Committee, and were supposed to be providing an injection of reason in the face of my wild desire to name a daughter Olympia. One day, Yer Man’ll know just how much he owes his penis for saving him that weighty moniker.
Herself ’s taste in names veers to the Frank Zappa end of eccentric. She wasn’t quite proposing Moon Unit, but Bay was a favourite of hers, and she just couldn’t get her head around the fact that Bae now means something totally different. At all hours of the day and night, texts of names so bizarre that I thought initially they were the result of ass-dialling, pinged into my phone.
Luckily for Yer Man, while I luxuriated in a morphine haze in the hours after his birth, Himself took the initiative and named him Rufus, before I could state my slurred case for Prospero.
Now we’re on the baby-name hunt again, and it’s looking like this baby, currently known as Bugg, might end up, well, forever known as Bugg.
I’m a bad decision-maker at the best of times, never mind with the added layer of illogicality that pregnancy seems to bring. Last week, I went for a manicure, and when confronted with literally an entire wall of lovely nail varnishes to choose from, for some bizarre reason, I opted for yellow, with a top layer of gold glitter. Because I had paid good money for this nail blunder, I suffered a week with the yellow glitter, painfully aware that I looked like someone with dirty hands and an eighty-a-day cigarette habit, before the BitchHerd intervened.
“Friends don’t let other friends go around with glittery yellow fingernails,” they said, during a brunch intervention. I shelled out the dosh for a new polish, though not before putting the colour decision to our Whatsapp group. They lambasted several of my suggestions, before we settled on a nice midnight blue.
This reminded me of the pain of telling other people your baby-name ideas. They cannot, it seems, politely hide their feelings on any suggested name. “What about Ludo?” I’d mull aloud to a friend. “Is Ludo a good name?” “For a domestic animal, perhaps?” came the disdainful reply. When namehunting, everything can be potential inspiration. While making these tasty filo lamb pastries, I found myself mulling over ‘Filo’ for a girl. Time for another intervention?