Grommet en route

I've been meaning to mention that Beth's wife C is pregnant; she's now in her second trimester. Congratulations again!

They're calling the baby-to-be "Grommet"; for an explanation, follow the link.

. . . On a side note, I'm always intrigued by the gender-neutral nicknames that parents use for kids-in-progress. Those of you who've used such nicknames, I invite you to post them as comments to this entry. But first go and congratulate Beth and C, if you know them. (Or, heck, even if you don't.)

While I'm here, I may as well also point to Beth's latest entry, in which she explains how to get a parking space in the Castro: just sing showtunes! Or parodies thereof; hers was "Somewhere, there's a space for us." I want to spread this as a new urban legend or folklore or superstition or something, so next time you're looking for parking in the Castro, give it a try, and then come back and report on whether it worked. (Ideally, tell us it worked even it didn't, to provide evidence to get more people to try it.) Also, feel free to post any particularly good showtune-parody lyrics you come up with that have to do with parking.

11 Responses to “Grommet en route”

  1. R

    ‘Little one’ is the nickname we used for both our sons before birth, even after we found out they were boys.

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  2. fran

    We used “X” pronounced as the Greek letter “Chi” for our first child. And what a cute little variable she turned out to be… For the second, though we knew he would be a boy from sometime in the second trimester, we referred to him as the “Punitive Sibling” or P.S. As the last baby, he is also our post-script.

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  3. JessieSS

    We used Widget, because it’s a good word. I wanted to call my sister’s baby “the widget” even after he was born, and she didn’t want me to, so I saved it. I know my other sister’s fetal name was Huckleberry Finn, and one of my friends recently used Chickpea.

    I don’t have any plans for a second kid, but it would use Sprocket, I’m pretty sure.

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  4. Sumana Harihareswara

    My in-laws called their unborn kid The Beet.

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  5. Nao

    We wanted to come up with something interesting, but just ended up calling Theo “the passenger”. After he was born, he was “the boy” for a few days, because we weren’t expecting him yet and only had a girl’s name ready. It took us a while to find the right name (much to the hospital staff’s frustration).

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  6. jacob

    We called Nina “the peanut” in utero, and often since then as well. I sometimes call her Pea-Ni-nut as well (pronounced puhNEEnut). We decided that the appropriate nickname for the second baby (now known widely as “Henry”) would be “the filbert”, but I don’t think we actually used that very much. We had some trouble coming up with potential (real) names for him, so I would often refer to him by the most ridiculous names I could think of, to suggest that, if we didn’t come up with something good, we might get stuck with… something less good. So I’d ask “Is little Nebuchadnezzar kicking again?” I think we called him Scooter sometimes, also.

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  7. Tim Pratt

    Heather and I use “Pixel.”

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  8. Elaine

    Fleeing rapidly from the baby-naming topic….

    A friend of mine taught me the “Doris parking prayer”:

    Hail Doris full of grace
    Help me find a parking place [alternate: space]

    Which, when we still lived in the same city, we recited ritually upon driving almost anywhere. Although when I visited him in the Castro, later, neither of us was driving, so I can’t speak to its efficacy there.

    (Doris being Doris Day, of course, who in movies always got the most absurdly convenient parking spot. In NYC. In front of gigantic skyscrapers. The term of choice among friends now is “rockstar parking,” occasionally shortened to just RS.)

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  9. Anonymous

    We started with blasty the blastocyst and moved on to fetey the fetus, but neither were going to suffice. In utereo name #1 was eventually Hansa after the baby elephant at the zoo. She died last week (the elephant, not our child.) Name #2 was bunbun. After they were born each baby immediately took on their birth names and an elephant and kiwi joined the menagerie by the side of our bed and adopted the in utero name. So we ended up with four children.

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  10. Dan P

    Baby Nairn, after the biscuits (http://www.nairns-oatcakes.com/) which a friend of ours sent us from Scotland and N was eating a lot of around the time of the positive test.

    I guess this counts as the public-for-internet announcement. 🙂

    ‘Nairn’ is still in play (whimsically) as a post-birth name, it being an actual name within one of the cultures on our “appropriateable” list.

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  11. benrosenbaum

    I believe Aviva (child one) was called The Little Weasel in utero. I can’t recall if this was due to her habit of leaping about in the womb, or if it actually predated conception as a term for hypothetical future children in general.

    I myself was known as Little Whomever, back in the summer of ’69.

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