What's in a Name?

On Friday, November 7, 2008 at 12:01am Brett & I welcomed our child to the world and discovered that we we the parents of a daughter. During my pregnancy we chose to leave the gender of our child a mystery and to be surprised on their birthday. As a result we headed to the hospital with names in mind for both a boy and a girl, but we hadn't really settled on anything concrete and so our baby spent the first hours of her life as Baby Girl Rome. Eventually we agreed that we would name our daughter Corinne Michaela.

We knew that if our baby was a girl that we wanted to find a name that started with the letter C since both of our mothers have names beginning with that letter. We liked Corinne.

Both my brother and I have middle names that have familial tribute - my brother's middle name is the male version of our mothers' first name and I share a middle name with my paternal grandmother. Still with me? So, I knew I wanted to do something similar for our child's middle name. Corinne's middle name is the female version of her father's middle name (Michael).

Practically since the day she was born we have had people asking us what we would call her for short...I didn't realize that Corinne was such a long name that it needed to be abbreviated. I think most people figured we would call her Cori. She is not and will never be Cori to me. I still most often refer to her as Corinne when I'm talking with someone about her and even when I am talking directly to her. However, over the last 21 months or so Corinne has had a myriad of nicknames, the most popular of which are Rin (the last syllable of her name and the way she refers to herself most of the time) or Rinna or Rinna-roo.

She also has plenty of pet-names that have absolutely nothing to do with her given name. When I was pregnant Brett & I would refer to her as 'bean' because that's what she looked like when we saw the firs ultrasound pictures. We don't call her that anymore...because that's not what she looks like anymore! These days I am more apt to call her 'punkin' or 'punky' or 'punky-doo' - none of these have anything to do with anything but they've stuck nonetheless.

And, in my mind I often refer to her as 'BG' which stems from those first few hours when she was simply Baby Girl Rome but has recently started to take on an abbreviation for big girl, our baby is growing up.