Thursday, January 22, 2015

How will you be named?

Apparently my kids think its normal to name themselves. For those of you who have heard my tales you are probably familiar with the tale of Cheeky naming himself Ronak. If you aren't and wish to get acquainted, do read the link at the bottom. It seems to be a never ending battle with not 1 but both my kids. They think its quite normal to rename themselves. And I have to run nick names by them too.

The Cheeky Tale:
We are a Tamil family with too many last names. Traditionally we take the first name of our dad as the last name. As you can imagine that can get quite confusing. After marriage, the girl takes the husband's first name as the last name. I ofcourse chose not to. So now we are stuck with 3 last names. In a stroke of genius we decided it would make our lives so much easier and conversations with doctor offices so much shorter if we all had the same last name. So we picked a family name and decided to retain our current last name as a middle name. So no one loses right? Except my kids wanted to have a say in it. After arguing with us for hours, Cheeky came up to us and said. Hey I know.. when you change my name can I be Peter James? That ended the name change discussion in our house, forever!

The Tootsie Tale:
Tootsie is 4 now and we have run through all possible nick names I can give her. But she just hates them all. I love to call my kids by nick names, pet names that only mommy uses and a pen name that I use on my blog. So even before Tootsie was born we had a name picked for her and a pen name as well. But no nick name. Since their names are very close, I wanted to come up with something Unique that's only Tootsie. But my 1 and 2 yr old gave me opinions about Nick name. She is 4 now and I have settled on a cute little nick name for her Nu-nu... and she corrects me "Thats a baby name, not my name". So this summer for a dress up day I got her a pink dress, fairy wings and a beautiful tiara and wand. Told her she was Princess Nu-Nu. Since then she is a little bit more accepting of the name, but only occasionally. Well she will be till she knows the real story. I forgot about dress up day at school and walked in to a room full of princesses and super heroes! True "One Fine Day" moment... but I apologized to her and walked out. As I sat at a meeting that morning, the scene from One fine day flashed in my head. So I canceled my next meeting, rushed to Target and picked whatever I could find! They don't sell costumes in July, so I had to get creative. And it kind of helped! But not quite. My 4 yr old insists I use her full name to call her every time! Who does that? Do you?

[The Cheeky Tale: http://incessantmusings.blogspot.com/2007/12/naughty-gene-payback_20.html]

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