baby Ausum

it seems like nowadays new moms and dads end up finding a nickname for their little almost-human immediately after finding out the pregnancy even exists.  i guess it's a way to feel connected to the kid and to make it more real as it journeys into forming a brain, limbs, innards, etc. i know a lot of people call their fetus Peanut and i've heard Gummy Bear, Walnut and Moose among people i know.

i'm about four and a half months pregnant now and for lack of a less specific and scientific name i just kept calling it Future Baby (note: i'm aware that it's a boy, yet i still call him 'it.' it's just in my unmotherly nature, okay? hopefully that'll change soon. ha!). truth be told, i still don't feel too attached to it because i can't feel anything yet. so far it's still all very sciency to me and i haven't found the connection that i know some moms feel instantly. maybe that's why i haven't given it a name yet. moms out there calm down. don't get all sad for me. i'm not sad about it and i'm very happy to be pregnant.

this weekend some friends and i were talking about naming the baby. we discussed how Filipino people love to make a blend of  the mom's name and dad's name to create a new name (ex. Jaden+Evelyn=Jaedelyn). no thanks. or how people love to take a standard name but change the vowel or throw in an extra letter or two to make their kid's name 'unique' (ex. Michelle turns into Misheyl. probably not a real one but i'm exaggerating here to make a point).  also, no thanks.

we talked about how Ted's instagram name is tedisawesome and mine is always__awesome. we talked about how when we met via okcupid, my screen name was always_awesome and one of Ted's first messages to me was a link for iamawesome.com. when we got married, we found it appropriate to hashtag our wedding with #thelinsareawesome. we pretty much bombard people with the idea that we are awesome. obnoxious, i know. so much so that people are also buying us baby things that say "awesome" on it.

while talking about all of this, someone said we should name the kid Awesome or make it a middle name. ___ Awesome Lin sorta has a ring to it. we thought it was funny and ridiculous for a while. then we threw around the idea that we'd have to spell it differently to be even more unique and stupid. it'd have to be spelled a-u-s-u-m to make it over the top. this is all probably not that funny now but at the time i'll assure you that we were all on the same page about it's ridiculousness. so since we hadn't given Future Baby and official nickname yet, we decided that before he is born, Ausum it is!