When you’re pregnant one thing you think about a lot is what you’re going to name your baby?
Will it be something modern or traditional? A family name or something different?
One thing you don’t count on is your baby deciding that they’re going to do their own thing and pick their own name.
When my daughter was born I decided to call her Alice. It’s a family name that hasn’t been used in a generation and also one of my favourite books.
Over the last year and a half she’s collected a variety of nicknames, mostly adaptions of her name like Al, Ali and occasionally Liccie.
I’ve personally always called her Ali-Baba but recently she decided she wasn’t responding to any of them anymore. She’s got her own new name.
I think the funniest thing about the new name she’s picked for herself is that it’s completely random.
It’s got nothing to do with any of her names including her surname.
What is it that she’s decided to start calling herself? BeBe.
At first I thought she was just saying ‘me’ but after a bit of trial and error realised that she was actually referring to herself as BeBe.
I have absolutely no idea where she picked it up but it is the only thing she will answer to at the moment.
She is friendly with a little girl called GG so maybe she wanted to match. Who needs friendship bracelets?
I don’t know if it’s just a phase or a nickname that will stick for life. It would be very Irish of her if it did.
My grandmother has always been called Marie but her birth name is actually Bridget. Another relative always went by Dano despite his name actually being Thomas.
I try to explain this to friends from abroad and they think it’s madness but in Ireland it’s fairly normal.
All of my nicknames have generally just been shortened versions of my name. The major exception being one family friend who called me Mindy.
My uncle Angelo also calls me Patricia but that’s a whole other story.
For now anyway my little girl has decided to skip all the ‘A’ nicknames and head straight to ‘B’. Or two ‘B’s to be exact.
