we went out to the market this morning.

upon return, in amongst the weekend flyers dragged in from the porch advertising marvellous Walmart specials and bizarre lawn ornaments i can’t imagine anyone wanting to buy, i found a book.  an apparently new book, with price tag still attached.  not the sort of book that usually comes with the sales ads…there’s not a single Huggies coupon in the thing.

it is titled What NOT To Name Your Baby.

how this mysterious tome came to grace my kitchen table, i do not know.  i do know that the book is quite entertaining, despite the fact that Oscar is among the more than one thousand names it sardonically prohibits…i’ve come to expect the world to take a bit of a piss on that front.  we’re fair game.  in North America, having a kid named Oscar perpetuates a rather thick skin in a parent.  yep, like the Grouch.  he’s our favourite muppet. or, yes, we LOVE Academy Award season.  (insert sarcasm as necessary).  my favourite…oh yes, we call his penis the Oscar Meyer weiner…we picked the name for that very reason! (that last is a fictional response to a real question posed to me by an elderly woman on the street one day.  charming.)

i have vague suspicions that the anonymous book donor may actually be a worried grandparent, afraid that we’ll either call the baby Elmo or Miss Piggie this time round (my father’s family are vastly tickled by their oft-repeated and immensely clever jokes on this front) or that we do, in fact, actually plan to continue calling her Hughloise after her arrival.  we don’t…we just like telling my mom that.  her middle name’s Louise, so we say it’s for her.  then she turns this gorgeous, flustered red.  very fun.

(if in the colossally unlikely case that five separate ultrasounds were wrong and she is actually a he, i’m betting that Dave will cave and actually let me call him Hugh, but that’s as close as we’ll really get to Hughloise.  his half of the creation – Heloise, for the twelfth-century errant abbess – never quite made it onto my lists.  i like old names and all, but not ones that call to mind those Hints from Heloise newspaper columns of my childhood.  i never liked her mayonnaise recipes one bit.)

if we’re casting our thanks/aspersions in the wrong direction, though, and anyone out there would like to take credit for the kind and mysterious gift of What Not to Name Your Baby, please speak now.  i think you’ve already said your piece. :)

and if anyone has any naming suggestions – preferably in the realm of “austere yet dowdy”, no cute Kaylees or eltra-femme Larissas or neologic McBritneylyns need apply, fine names though those may be (or not, ahem) for other people’s children – bring ‘em on.  right now, we’re kinda taken by Hortense, inexplicably NOT an entry in the book…think of the nicknaming possibilities!!***

i wonder if we should start locking our door when we go out?

***uh, kidding on Hortense.