What's In a Name?

If you're reading this thinking you're going to learn the name of our son, go ahead and stop. We are still very much in flux about his name. We won't keep it a secret once we decide, I promise...but we just can't decide yet. And since my brother waited until his child was 3 days old to name him, I'm not really feeling too much pressure to decide when I still have 8 weeks to be pregnant!

So back to names. Katie is obsessed with stuffed animals and seriously probably has 100 of them. I'm embarrassed to go count for the same reason I won't count the pairs of shoes I have. We both have a problem. Of course, I feed my own habit of shoes and other people are feeding Katie's habit of stuffed animals. We have a big family of enablers where Katie is concerned.

While many of the animals are characters from movies or come pre-assigned with names on their tags, the ones that aren't go through a rigorous naming ceremony once Katie becomes their owner! She looks them over from top to bottom and thinks long and hard about what to name them. She's perfectly fine waiting a day or so to see what comes to her.

Katie with about half of her collection! Completely minus Toy Story friends who are not considered stuffed animals even if they are animals like Bullseye, Buttercup, or Hamm.

Here's a sampling of some of the names she's come up with...

A big dog named Big Dog.

A bulldog/rottweiler (not sure which) named Black Sam (who only has a black nose). 

A black labrador named Shadow.
A pug named Noggin.
A dog puppet named Stu.
Two beagle puppies simply named Max's mommy and Max's daddy.

A penguin named Beard.

An alligator name Bottle.

An orange tiger named White School Bus.

A purple cat named Spongey.
A siamese cat named Simon Bird.

A lion named Joe Lion.

A duck named Polar Bear.

Bunnies named Big Nose, BunBun, and Wake (awake) Bunny.

I love her creativity and it's so fun to see the wheels turning as she contemplates names for her animals. And in case you're wondering how she decides if something is a boy or a girl - it's all about the lashes. If it has eyelashes, it's a girl. If not, it's a boy. Imagine her frustration that her new Nala (girl lion from Lion King) doesn't have eyelashes. She tells me that "they" just forgot to put them on because she knows Nala is a girl.