MicroblogMondays: What’s In a Name?

I don’t know if people who have been trying for a baby for a long time are all like me.  I have had names for my future babies for quite some time.  I guess when there is plenty of time to wait, there is also a lot of time to consider names.  I have fallen in love with this one particular boy name a couple of years ago.  It’s a name that could be viewed as an English name or a Chinese name, and it also exists in many other languages.  It has a great meaning in my native tongue, which means “to enlighten”.  I just love it so much.   I didn’t have a middle name for the boy for the longest time.  My husband, who is quite a jokester, has not been very helpful in this endeavor.  He kept on coming up with funny sounding Indian names that couldn’t possibly become our boy’s name.  We finally found something that we liked after we got pregnant.  This middle name has a meaning that is symbolic of enlightenment found in difficult situations, which matches our boy first name perfectly.  As for a girl, I have liked this one middle name for a long time.  It is also in my native language that means “easygoing”, but it is not an English name so it doesn’t sound too good as a first name.  Hence it will become our baby girl’s middle name.  With a Chinese middle name, an Indian first name seems fitting for a girl.  I had liked this one Indian girl name for a long time, but it seems like every other Indian girl has that name.  I do not want a super popular name for my child.  So this name has been abandoned.  A couple of years ago I came across this other beautiful name that means “grace”, which is perfect for us.  We haven’t told any of our parents about the names yet, but my mother-in-law recently has declared that we can do all we want to name our babies, but she’ll call our children the names that she will give them.  These names that she will come up with will not be on any formal or government documents but she can use them if she wants to.  I have no qualms about them.  Now since I won’t disclose the babies’ real names on this blog now or ever, I will tell you all their nicknames that derive from these real names.  Like I said, my husband is a jokester.  He jokes around a lot.  Our boy’s first name unfortunately sounds like vegetables in one of Bob’s Indian languages.  I am quite adamant about using that name so even though it means something funny in his language, we are still going to use that name.  Now since the name means vegetables, we have nicknamed our baby boy “Okra”, which is Bob’s favorite vegetable.  Unfortunately, there is not a single emoji made for Okra, so our boy has appeared as an eggplant in Bob’s texts to me.  And then my jokester husband has been making fun of our girl’s first name and been rhyming it with something funny.  I initially was upset that he had been butchering our girl name and had considered not using that name.  But knowing Bob that he likes to joke and he’d butcher whatever name we’d come up with, I decided to just use that name and let that joke become the nickname for our girl.  I won’t explain why but we have nicknamed our girl “Bunny”, which derives from the joke for our girl’s name.  So there you have it.  Okra and Bunny.  Or as presented as an emoji of a Bunny and an emoji of an Eggplant in all of Bob’s texts to me.  I hope that Fac.ebook answers Bob’s inquiry/complaint about the nonexistence of the Okra emoji so we will be able to use one in the future for the boy.  Otherwise he’d have an identity crisis: Am I an Okra or an Eggplant???