a rose by any other name...

my son, critterbug, knows mummy and daddy's names. occasionally he calls us by them, which results in hard looks. and usually confuses me for a couple seconds, since i am almost never called by my name.

my husband almost never calls me by name. i get 'love', 'honey', 'babe', 'sweetheart', 'darling', anything like that. 'sarah' is usually (recently) if he hears a bang and thinks ive fallen over, or in a fit of exasperation because i havent heard him calling/talking to me. or when ive called him by name in a fit of exasperation, and he retaliates. because i dont call him by name either. not to his face. talking about him to other people i will, but talking TO him... no. its weird.

but not because his name doesnt fit him. it does. when i look at him, i dont think he has the wrong name. some people dont seem to fit their names. you meet someone called george and just go 'no... you should be alex'. i never thought i should be sarah. playing make believe as a child, i always renamed myself emma. i still sometimes think my mum gave me the wrong name - i was named after my great-grandmother, sarah emma. something i didnt know when i wanted to be emma.

critterbug's name fits him, too. both critter, which we do actually call him, and his real name. one of the first things we did when we found out we were going to have him (after a few weeks of numb 'i must be dreaming, because this is an absolute nightmare' and terror, followed by terror of a different sort when i thought i might be miscarrying), was to buy a baby name book. we went through it and picked out the names we liked, and settled on a girl's name and a boy's name, since we werent going to find out what the baby was till it was born.

we found out we were pregnant in february, the due date was september, and the names were picked sometime before june. i know that, because we moved to australia in june, and the names were picked long before then.

this time... we still really like the girl's name we didnt get to use, and are keeping that. we've decided to use family names (as in names from family members, not surnames/last names) as middle names, so where critter gets 'lee', from hubby's father's middle name, the girl's name gets 'jacqueline', my paternal grandmother's middle name. even though my cousin already used it on his baby. WE HAD IT PICKED OUT FIRST!!! ahem. anyway.

the problem we're coming up against is boy's names. like i said, we had critter's names picked by the time i was 6 months, and weve been holding onto a girl's name for the past 4.5 years, but at 8 months, we still cannot come to a conclusion on boy's names. keeping with the family thing, the middle name will be 'dan' or 'daniel', after my maternal grandfather, depending on which fits with the first name better... but thats where we hit a dilemma. we have 4 names we like, and none of them are jumping out at us. ive always liked 1, but hubby insists he will call the baby by a nickname i cant stand if we pick that. im not sure if hes joking or not. we both like 2, but neither of us like the inevitable aussie shortening, which WILL happen. again, we both like 3, but dont like where everyones mind jumps at the mention of it. (nothing dirty!! just the inevitable 'oh.. from XYZ-movie??') he originally picked out 4, and i was skeptical. the more i think about it, the more i like it, but now he isnt sure if he still likes it, and insists he was joking when he picked it. he says he likes it, but its too oldfashioned.

we are doomed, and the baby, if male, will be 'spaceghost' on its birth certificate, im sure.