Josie is nearly three months old and we still don’t have any kind of consistent name for the little fucker. We don’t even have a nickname. Or more accurately, we have, like, 237 different nicknames.
It will go without saying that we spent months debating an official name, with my wife continually rejecting my well-intentioned nominations. (Example: Irvinga! A feminized tribute to my beloved grandfather Irving. Original. Poetic. Overruled.) We looked long and hard at the name Peanut Almond, which we thought would be incredibly edgy and cool. In the end, though, we couldn’t pull the trigger. There were concerns that we might be cut out of various wills. Also: that our daughter might murder us when she hit junior high.
In the end, we settled on Josephine Colette, which we know sounds sort of Frenchy, but has a nice lilt to it, and a certain old school sangfroid, and also manages to avoid the trendy name trap (i.e. Madison, Sophie, Olivia). But the truth is, now that she’s among us, we almost never call her Josie or Jo or even JoCo.
We call her “Tuntle” and “Jellybean” and “Miss Pink Megink.”
These names just keep generating themselves, based on various free associative riffs that tend to go along with early parenting. Thus we proceed from Milkface to Milkface McGoo to Goo to Gooface to Gooface Killah. And from Lambchop to Porkchop to Pooks to Pooksville to Last Train to Pooksville to Francis Ford Pookola. It just doesn’t end. There’s a new one every day, sometimes more than one. And we switch back and forth incessantly. Which is fine, right? Except that at a certain point the kid is going to get totally confused. She’s gonna be like DeNiro in Taxi Driver: You talkin to me?
I guess we’ll need to keep her away from firearms.
