Baby AKA Baby

Naming our daughter wasn’t the easiest task. Even with a baby name book. There was much debate, pleading, begging and even some deal-making.  Deal-making as in, “I’ll get the first name, you can have the second” or “I’ll name the first kid and you can name all the other ones.” It was hard to trust that last deal. My wife and I haven’t decided how many kids to have yet. But the answer is 1 or 2.

Eventually there was an agreement and we settled on a beautiful name for our daughter. I shouldn’t have written settled. More like, found a great name that we both liked. Six months later we barely ever call our daughter by that name. Instead we almost exclusively call her by a random nickname. That nickname is Monkey.

I’m not even sure how she became Monkey, it’s not like she was born with a prehensile tail. She’s not a real monkey. I can corroborate that with ultrasounds. I think it’s something that all those baby name books don’t tell you. You get tired of calling your baby the same name. So you start using nicknames.

Muffin. Cupcake. Honey. Dumpling. Pumpkin. Cookie. Sweetpea. Mechanically Separated Chicken. Bean.  Sugar Plum. Sugar. And those are just some of the food-based nicknames. There are other categories; animals, royalty, poop-related. Poop-related is a large category. Before Monkey was Monkey she was almost Stinker.

So here we are with the most Darwinian of nicknames and one of the most popular. I know it’s one of the most popular because I’ve seen it on a t-shirt at the Baby Gap and I’ve heard other parents call their monkeys Monkey. My first reaction to hearing other parents use ‘monkey’ was that they were talking about my Monkey. My second was that I need a more original nickname. But, the thing is, you can’t choose a nickname. Nicknames are either earned or maliciously applied by others.

So my daughter is a monkey. Sometimes we feed her bananas. Not that often because all that potassium clogs her up and the next day she has a red-faced banana BM. That’s how I know she’s not a real monkey. Real monkeys have an easier time passing bananas.