IKEA

On Saturday I had a truly lovely day. My brother drove from Nottingham to visit us, arriving early. We went cycling. Lovely. We came back and had a barbecue. Lovely. Some friends came over for chat, some Paralympic watching and drinks. LOVELY.

Yes, Saturday was a day to savour.

I know how the world works. Cruel bastard that it is, the world ensures you pay for your lovely day with one not so lovely. It must be excruciating. It must make you question your continued existence. It must, therefore, include a visit to IKEA.

The last time we went to IKEA was the day before Cam was born. This time we were hoping we'd just come back with a highchair. Plus the obligatory tea lights.

When you drive to IKEA there is always a traffic jam. This is because everybody else is going to IKEA. Everybody else is always going to IKEA, because they put crack cocaine in the meatballs so that you feel strangely compelled to return, even though the meatballs aren't very nice. The chips are soggy and the cola tastes like it was made by carbonating some toilet water and adding some non-specific brown from somewhere. Possibly the same toilet.

Because there's always a traffic jam, there's a sense of triumph just in arriving at IKEA. It's nice, because it masks the fact that IKEA is full of EVERYONE IN THE WORLD, all clammering after tea lights.

Everything in IKEA has a ridiculous name. Ostensibly this is because IKEA is Swedish, and apparently everything in Sweden is given a hilarious moniker. Maybe they just have a good sense of humour. 

Would you like a kitchen utensil called BIIG KOK? IKEA can help you out. A beanbag named LAJ TITZ? No problem. 

We bought some bibs for when we start to wean Cam. They are actually called KLADD PRICKAR. I haven't made that up. Their name suggests that they are an item in which you would clad a prick. Most people call that a condom.

The bibs weren't the main event though, the ANTILOP (what?) highchair was. Everyone buys their highchair from IKEA. It's cheap, functional, has the look of a bakelite telephone from the 80s. It's the one thing that made our trip to IKEA worthwhile.

That and the 50p hotdog.

Names

I heard a story recently about names.  Part of me hopes it isn't true.  It went like this: a couple has three children.  The oldest is called Coco, the middle child Princess.  When the third child is born they register him with the name Dikenwe.  The registrar is a little surprised, so asks the parents how they decided on it:

"We named all our children after perfumes we like, Coco by Chanel, Princess by Vera Wang and now Dikenwe, you know, because we couldn't call him DKNY"

Oh dear.  What a terrible abuse of power.  Thankfully, he'll only have to live with it until he's sixteen, when he can change it via Deed Poll.  Or maybe he'll love it, it's certainly different.

But even without the benefit of having a parent who is clearly mental, many people end up with names they're not keen on.  We're keen to avoid that, which is why we've been having the name conversation now for nearly twenty weeks.  Because we want to like the name we give our baby.  We also want our baby to like his name, once he's old enough to have an opinion on it.

Meet my son, his name is Sexy.

It's difficult though, isn't it?  Without realising it, I've been going through my life marking names up with little tags: John is too common.  Luke, Leo and Liam would all be alliterative with the surname.  Isaac is already taken by a close member of family.  I was bullied at school by someone called Jason, and someone else called Antony.  Colin sounds too old.  Matthew is too biblical.

Mrs L has a separate list of names which she wouldn't want to bestow on the boy, some of which I quite liked.

We want something a bit different.  But not too different.  Something with no negative connotations from people we've known, or people from history (not too many Adolfs around these days, wonder why?)

The conversation isn't over.  Won't be over until the day we register the baby.  But we do have a short list now.  Eventually we realised there aren't going to be many names we can say, without any reservation, that we're 100% happy with, so we went for the closest we could get.  There are five names on the list, I'm not going to write them here, but I will write our concerns:

Options one, two and three: they're nice, safe, popular names.  But that's the problem, they're a bit dull.
Option four: is shared with a current politician, whose policies we don't like.  We'd like to avoid the inevitable "is he named after...?" questions.
Option five: is of French origin.  Neither of us is remotely French.  We're a bit worried that it might be a touch silly.

When the little guy does make an appearance though, I'm sure all our concerns will melt away.  We're not going to love the boy because of his name, but because of what he is.  A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and a son by whatever name will be amazing.