One day, one of the kids learned of Native American Indian names with English translations like ‘sitting bull.’ It was a dinner table topic that night; resulting in choosing names for everyone with representative animal and verb. (Actually an infinitive with a present participle!)
We had so much fun picking names to characterize each of our kids, and pretty much got unanimous agreement on these. Keep in mind, this was a few years ago and before we even thought about moving to a farm. These names came up at dinner tonight, and everyone thinks my given name is a riot now that we are here on the farm.
- My eldest is ‘Slouching Rabbit’ – When I was pregnant with my daughter we called her ‘Thumper’ and bought her a little stuffed thumper from the Disney movie, Bambi. Around the time of her name creation, she would not sit up at the table! Pre-teen!!
- My middle son is ‘Farting Bear’ -He has always been my cuddle bear – he always needed to touch and I LOVE this about him. He can also be gruff as he’s getting older, but most of the time he’s sweet teddy-bear type – he picked the descriptive action for himself and got a good laugh from all the boys (including Dad). It stuck.
- Burping Fish – When my youngest was a newborn we saw the movie ‘Finding Nemo’. In one scene Dory, played by Ellen Degeneres, finds a jellyfish and claims him as her pet and names it ‘squishy’. My husband and I started calling the baby, ‘Squishy’ so we tried to use ‘squishy fish’ as his animal name – but our kids overruled us. You see, squishy can belch like he’s doing it for a competition. So that was that.
- Spanking Buffalo – On a trip driving through Amish Country my husband kept joking with the kids that he was looking for an Amish Store to buy an Amish spanking machine (completely made up). My youngest son was just talking and kept repeating it, “a spanking machine?” My husband’s always been a fan of buffaloes, so that name stuck.
- Screaming Chicken – Now it isn’t exactly how it sounds… ahem. My husband has always referred to me as ‘chicken’. When I stood with my hands on my hips, he said I was holding out my wings (elbows), when I was cold and got goosebumps, he’d point out my ‘chicken skin’. Now that we live on the farm and actually have chickens, and I’ve heard them scream, I should be offended!
Well that rounds out our human menagerie of five, completely outnumbered these days by the animals. I should start a count one of these days… right now we have 8 goats, lots of chickens, and 4 dogs.