I am currently about 9 weeks pregnant and, as it turns out, so is a good friend of mine who lives across the country. Since we got pregnant a couple of days apart we’ve been emailing back and forth about all of the pregnancy related hoopla going on in our lives and we’ve each given our fetus a nickname until we can find out genders and come up with legitimate baby names. She has nicknamed her fetus Squiggle due to the shape on the ultrasound. I have nicknamed my fetus Steve McQueen (from the 1963 movie The Great Escape) because the fetus is in there planning it’s very own great escape and because it reminds me of Eddie Izzard.
After thinking about it I realized that most of the people I know who’ve had a baby have nicknamed their fetus in some way, whether it was referred to as Tiny Pirate (as it had boarded her ship without her permission) or Parasite or any number of things in between. This got me wondering what other hilarious nicknames people have given to their unborn. Did you give your fetus a nickname and, if so, what was it?
We called my first one “Enrique”. I don’t remember how it started, but it made me giggle. I was hormonal, after all. It’s better than “it”. And of course, were I to have miscarried, no one would be making stupid jokes about the name. Why would we?
We called one The Whippersnapper. I don’t remember exactly how that came about. My favorite, though, was a friend who called hers Otis, as in Otis the Foetus.
I drove a friend to her ultrasound, and she had nicknamed her fetus “Sprog”. The technician said nicknames were pretty common, and lots of people, like the Torques, used “Peanut”.
For my nephew we called him Itsy - because at the time we didn’t know whether he was a boy or a girl. My good friend jokingly referred to his unborn son as Thor, now we all won’t let that go! (Much to his mom’s dismay).
Before he was born, our first son was “Hermione”. Well, we had to give him a name, we didn’t know if he was a boy or a girl, and we gave him a name that we knew we wouldn’t use after he/she was born.
However, we didn’t bother with our other three children.
We called ours Bean, even after we found out the gender and settled on a name.
There was a lot of “Geez, Bean, stop punching my hipbone!” I want to get him a Bean Bunny plush from the Muppets.
Now that he’s out in the world we’ve moved to calling him Butt, as in "well then don’t hit yourself in the face with your mallet toy, Butt!
This happened to couple who named their fetus “Pudding.” They miscarried and wrote a book about it called “An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination.” Everything in the book was Pudding-this and Pudding-that.
It does seem a bit weird to me, but to each his own.
A friend of mine called hers Alien. Which was cute enough while he was inside, but the kid is now almost three and everyone in their family still calls him that. I find that annoying - you gave him a real name, why don’t you use it? I swear this kid doesn’t even know what his name actually is.
We called our son “Um”, short for “Uterus Monster”, which I stole from a friend, who did the same thing.
As soon as he was born, he became the BubbySaurus. (BubbySaurus Rex when he cried.) Now he’s the Saurus, or some variation thereof. SnuggleSaurus. TurboSaurus.
