[Note: When I get some time, I will be reorganizing this site's categories. Pardon the dust.]
This is the back story about Jem's name, as well as the nicknames she's accumulated in her first week of life.
"Jem" is for use on the Internet alone. At home she goes by her name or any of the other nicknames explained below. She also, of course, is called Bug. Everyone in the house is called Bug.
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Initially Jem's first name was going to be Riley. Then we encountered a Very Strange Child at Bug's daycare with that name and promptly struck it from consideration. We were later to find out that the Very Strange Child's name was actually a variation beginning with B. By then, however, we had been hearing Riley way too much for our comfort -- we didn't want her to be one of several when she started school -- so we kept looking at other options. (Honestly, seeing items personalized with the name in the Pottery Kids catalog did it for me.) When K suggested Jem's first name, we were thrilled to find it nowhere in the top 100 names for the U.S. for several years. Bingo!
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Ask any parent and they will tell you what animal their child's primordial scream resembled. Bug was definitely a duck. Jem was much harder to place, taking me a few days to really pin it down. Have you ever been awakened in the middle of the night by a couple cats fighting outside? That's Jem. Angry kitty. She'll start with a low mreowing caterwaul and rev up to a ghastly, spitting screech, kicking her legs and waving her arms around. I swear that she hissed at me last night, too. When she first started with the spitting, she reminded me of the beginning of some "Tom and Jerry" cartoons where Tom replaces the MGM lion and is acting all bad ass.
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I'm sure after the pictures posted the other day, some inquiring minds are curious about the whole "Morty" thing. Many will agree that all babies to some degree look like old men. If not, they'll at least agree that most babies have "wise eyes." In her rare moments of calm, alert wakefulness, Jem looks like a wise old man, definitely one named Morty, to me.
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I can't stop calling her Sweetcheeks. Can you blame me?
