whence 'pumpkin'

Last night, my baby momma said we should explain the kid's name.

punkin ... pum'kin ... pumpkin ...

We have real names picked out, but don't yet know if the punkin is a girl or a boy. I hate saying "it" just because we don't know the sex of the baby, and I find "he or she" to be awkward under almost all circumstances.

A few years back, my boss at the last corporate gig announced that he and his wife were pregnant. (Until that point, I'd always thought that women got pregnant, but no, apparently couples get pregnant. I have yet to tell anyone "we're pregnant" though. Do couples get knocked up?)

Boss-man started referring to his unborn progeny as "the peanut" because of how the critter looked on the ultrasound. Their ultrasound must have been earlier than ours, because our little punkin has a definite human profile, but I liked the idea of having a pre-gendered nickname so you don't have to say the baby this and the baby that. Since then, we've known several pregnant couples, and most of them come up with an equivalent of the peanut: the tadpole, the passenger, thumper ... even the cannibal. (Don't ask.)

Another part of the story is that I have no pet name to call my own. Nathalie called me sweetie and sweetheart, but then I noticed that she called our cats the same things.

She calls my cat Bones "White Boy" which it seems to me is another appropriate appellation for me -- and one with some precedent. But no. That one is the cat's.

Then she started to call me babe or sometimes baby. But those too became terms of feline affection.

Finally, late last October, she started calling me pumpkin. I liked it. I made her promise that she would not call either of the cats by that name. And she did so promise. And I believed her, because it seemed like an unlikely pet name for either of our actual pets.

And then she took the pregnancy test. On Halloween. And we checked the results together. (Trick or treat!) And we decided that the baby was the pumpkin.

This time I didn't mind giving up the name.

- papa