Nigel

I love to name things.  It is a not-so-secret obsession that I have.  I named the leather chair in our living room Larry the Leather Chair (and that is how he is referred to...or sometimes just Larry for short.).  I've named all of our plants...there are The Roberts (because they were were originally two rubber trees that I combined into one one pot, hence the plural), there's Eduardo (it was fun to say at the time), and there's The Wine Bottle Plant (because I rooted it in a wine bottle, obviously.).  Once we had a lime tree that we called Lorenzo Limeas (like Lorenzo Lamas - get it?  Uriah and I laughed when we thought of it, but we don't really talk about the lime tree; he lost his will to live one January day in the darkest part of winter.  Uriah still hasn't gotten over it.).  The funny thing is, if I ask Abby to water, for example, The Roberts, she knows exactly which plant I'm talking about.

Names for inanimate objects just come to me (it's like a gift from God or something).  But when it came to naming Finneaus, we probably changed our minds 37 thousand times, we bickered about it and laughed about it and vetoed each other's choices constantly.  It was the hot button topic of conversation for 9 solid months.  Last week, when I was sorting through our boxes of books downstairs, I came across the baby naming book and stuffed inside of it was the list of names we'd picked out.  My handwriting was wiggly because we'd been taking a road trip and our list is on the back of an old envelope - with doodles and names scratched out.  It was the beginning of June;  I'm sure we felt it was crunch time because at every doctor's appointment I went to, they kept telling us how big the baby was measuring.  We needed to, at the very least, narrow down our list of boy names.  A girl name was never an issue, we'd decided on that long ago, and Uriah was only half interested in coming up with a suitable boy name because he was certain we were having a girl.  A boy name, to him, was a waste of time.  I, on the other hand, knew we were having a boy - call it mother's intuition, but I always referred to the baby as a "he" - so I knew we needed a boy name picked out.  Finneaus didn't even make it onto the short list of boy names, because Uriah wasn't that keen on it at the time.  But when we finally had him in our arms, he didn't really look like any of the names on our list.  Now that he's a little bit older, it's sort of funny to look at Finneaus and try on other names from our list, just to see what it would feel like if we'd named him something else.  Maybe it's because we only know him as Finn, or maybe it's because we're just used to it now, but none of the other names fit him as well.     

Finn's new buddy, by comparison, was easy to name.  We call him Nigel - for no other reason than that's the name that came to me when the three of us (Finn, Nigel, and I) were playing.  Nigel reads bedtime stories with us.  He rides in the bike trailer on our bike rides, sometimes he gets punted off of the hearth and he's been pitched over the side of the wagon numerous times.  Once I even caught Finn stirring up Nigel in the big stock pot.  Nigel's ears have been chewed on, his tail has been stuck in the dirt and Finn has tried to stick his finger in Nigel's tiny plastic nose more times than I can count.

We sure do love us some Nigel.  His fur is soft, his body is squishy and best of all, he's just the right size to fit in the back of Finn's trike.