Names…. The one thing EVERYONE has an opinion on. When you are pregnant you hear everything from the sublime to the ridiculous. You agonise and possibly argue for hours over the perfect name to fit your little cherub. The moniker you choose will stick with your beloved angel for the rest of the life, so the gravity of this duty is immense. You need to get it just right. You need to make sure the initials don’t spell anything unfortunate, that nicknames such as Scabby Abby won’t eventuate and that every member of the extended family is satisfied. So the pressure, as you can imagine is intense.
During my pregnancy, my oldest friend visited from Melbourne to see me before I had the baby and to beg me not to “saddle” Elvis (as the bump was known) with a made up or weirdly spelt name. Her name is Carlamia, a name which her parents made up after watching some vampire flick in the 70’s with a villain named MiaCarla and while I think it is a beautiful name, she told me of the misery of having a name that must be spelled all the time and followed up with the story of how it came to be.
There was to be no argument from me on that. I wasn’t keen to have a name the required spelling or misspelling (as my seemingly common name Anne is often ) and apostrophies and Y’s and K’s randomly included in “youneek—the alphabet threw up over your birth certificate” spellings make my head hurt.
Choosing a name for the Big Elf took about 5 months and many arguments. Some people know the names they will have for their future children at 12. As I wasn’t planning on having children, those types of thoughts never crossed my mind. I bought baby name books and scoured magazines for names I liked. Since my husband is 12 years older than I,. His choice of names was a little more old fashioned than mine..and not in a good way. Eventually we had a shortlist. We eventually settled on Jed for a boy a week out from D Day and subjected it to the “Yell from the back porch” test—a scientific study in which a name is yelled loudly from the door way to call children home to test for “good sound”. Un fortunately Jed failed this test as every time we even said the name, our dog went CRAZY, barking and turning circles and going by the amount of yelling that happens here, our neighbours would have called for her extermination years ago!
We settled on Jacob, which could be shortened into Jake and Sienna and Indianna were eliminated for Jaimee should the first Elf be a girl. I should note at this point I read a lot of “women's” mags and watched a lot of soap operas.
After Jacob was born and the second Elf was on the way, a scan to reveal the sex of Elvis #2 at 32 weeks pregnant so we could tell my dying father what his next grandchild would be meant that we had to make the decision fast. Our previous choice Jaimee was passed in as I decided I didn’t want to be spelling it every time I said it (It’s Jamie, spelt the feminine way, J-a-i-m-e-e) Also Britney Spears teenage sister Jaimee had just become hot news by being 16 and pregnant and I wasn’t keen on people thinking I named my prefect angel after Britney et al. Charlotte was decided on, relatively painlessly, and I was able to whisper her name in Dads ear not long before he passed on. She now answers to Charly, or Horsey—which I’m not so sure would be a great name for a high court judge, however, going by the names I read in the papers, if she stuck with Horsey, she would be in good company form the unusal name brigade!
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