Dear Milo,
Over the past few months, you’ve had a few different nicknames. I created this little series to try and capture those nicknames and why.
You kept sleeping with your hand over your ear like you were DJ-ing. Who knows what you were really doing, but it was cute.
You quickly swelled into our very own Michelin Man. You hit 9.5kg / 20.9lbs at five months, so yeah, we were justified in calling you Chubs.
When you started finding your voice, you got into a yelp-y phase, which is what I would’ve imagined a Pokemon sounding like. You occasionally let out some roars to that fit the name Milosaurus.
You always looked like the boss whom no one could impress. Your mother would receive compliments on your R.B.F. (resting bitch face). So naturally, we addressed you with the proper salutation.
One of your mom’s originals that just stuck. It’s Chinese, and I mistakenly thought she was referring to you as a loaf of bread when she really meant “treasure”. But you know what, you did look like a loaf of bread when you were tightly swaddled.
An evolution to Bao Bao is Baobab. It’s such a funny word and it kept cropping up in The Little Prince, which has taken me the better part of nine months to read it all to you.
I think there’s an art to coming up with a good nickname. These are my general guidelines:
- Stating the most obvious, it needs to be relevant
- It plays off another word (e.g., replaces part of the original word)
- It should have either an element of rhyme or flow
- Keep it to one or two syllables – shorter names tend to be catchier, but are harder to come up with
