Buttercup

Here's the story behind Buttercup-as in why we actually call Buttercup-Buttercup. In a nutshell, you can chalk it up to commitment issues. I just couldn't commit to a name and so our daughter was nameless for a day, maybe it was two days...

I know, horrible right?  I feel kinda bad about the whole thing but I was sure we were having a boy and so when SHE came out it threw us for a loop.

I always had a particular girl's name in mind, and surprisingly my husband liked it too. I thought it was a classic name and didn't think it was trendy but suddenly it was on the top of all the baby name lists. I really didn't want my kid to be the third or fourth "Jennifer" in school.  Seriously, I can name at least five Jenn's from school.  So since we kinda had a girl's name we both liked (even though we were turned off by its surge in popularity) we decided to put all our focus on boy names because, let me tell you, we could not for the love of all that is good in this world agree on a boy's name. Thus, convincing me that we were definitely having a boy. (So much for mother's intuition)

I found choosing a name for our child to be stressful. What if our kid hates the name we select-what if after we go with a name -someone with the same name decides to go and do something stupid/tacky thus causing a distasteful association for every other poor soul that has the misfortune of sharing the same name. Perfect example--Lorena Bobbit. I rest my case.

It's a lot of pressure! So we stalled on officially naming her. Luckily, everyone was so distracted on learning the baby was a girl to give us too much of a hard time.  I learned very quickly in my pregnancy that when you opt to not find out the sex of the baby people become very invested in guessing telling you what you're having-the cleaning lady in the office, strangers on the subway, your dental hygienist.. . it even becomes competitive. At our baby shower we had a "guess the sex of the baby" photo booth.

It was a lot of fun. Overwhelmingly everyone, myself included thought boy for sure. I come from a family of all girls-surely it was time for some testosterone.

But no -what we thought was a he was a she all along and we couldn't be happier but we weren't 100% sure about her name. When the hospital pediatrician came in to examine her she of course asked us what her name was. When we told her she didn't have one she held up our nameless, wrinkly, tiny piece of perfection paused and said,  "I think I'll call you Buttercup" and we liked it-we liked it very much. And so it stuck. And that's how Buttercup or BC for short came to be.

Eventually we went with a name. Although, not our original first choice but not to fear it still tops the charts for most popular names. :/