Nicknames

Since we're not finding out the sex of the baby we have been having a hard time coming up with a name to call it.  We've been calling it "baby" a lot:  "How's the baby?" and "The baby is moving a lot."  We use the masculine pronoun more often, not out of thoughts that the baby is a boy, but more likely because we live in and were raised in a paternalistic society.  We use "it" a lot, which just seems wrong.

We've been searching for a suitable nickname nearly the whole pregnancy.

All the maternity resources compare the size of the baby each week to different food.  The first week we found out we were pregnant the baby was the size of a poppy seed.  I thought "poppy" would be a good nickname, but it didn't stick.

Lucas is studying Japanese for fun and wanted to call the baby akachan, which is Japanese for baby.  Akachan is a little too unwieldy.

Then we started to call it cucumber, cuke for short.  This nickname was based on the cutest interaction I had with a Chinese patient of mine.  I was still working as a nurse and I was taking care of this woman after her delivery who had immigrated from China four years prior.  She spoke English really well but her accent was very thick.  She heard me referring to her baby as "peanut."  She asked why I called her baby "peanut" and I said it was because I refer to all small babies as "peanut" because they're small like peanuts.  She was very happy and asked, "What do you call the big babies, coo-cum-bah?"  Since I'm convinced I'm going to have a large baby it made sense to nickname our baby cucumber.  Lucas was not a fan of cuke, so yet another nickname was tossed aside.

Just yesterday, a doctor I work with insisted we come up with a suitable nickname.  She was the one who completed my ultrasound screening the other day, and the little guy/gal wouldn't sit still for her to get a good look at the valves and vessels.  She asked, "Can we call it cricket?"  I loved it immediately.

I think we'll call him/her "cricket."