7 March 2011, by Mandy Loh
He? She? It???…Introducing Boubbles!
Recently, we’ve had many people asking us “so are you having a boy or a girl?” and they get quite surprised when we tell them that we’re not intending to find out until the day the baby is born.
It’s fun to keep the suspense going, kinda like waiting for Christmas morning to open your presents. Tim and I feel that it’ll be so special to find out the gender of our baby at the moment of birth! Yep, we like to go back to the stone-age and not take advantage of modern medical technology, haha!
The natural second question people have is ” so how are you going to buy clothes for the baby? Or decorate the baby room?” But honestly, we’ll have so much time to shop for the baby after the birth, so we’re just going to prepare a few sets of neutral-coloured infant clothes, in white, yellow, green, orange or red. (So many choices already! Much less limiting than pink or blue, isn’t it?) As for the baby room, we’re probably going to decorate it with cute animal motifs, so that works for either gender too!
Meanwhile, to avoid referring to our baby as “he/ she” or worse, “it”, we decided to give him or her a fetal name. It was fun coming up with a nickname of sorts for the baby, because it would just be a name we would use before the birth; a special pet name of endearment for the bundle of joy growing bigger in the womb each day.
We had heard of lots of cute fetal names our friends had used previously, like “peanut”, “sesame”, or “jellybean”, mostly related to the shape or size of the baby at the first few ultrasound scans, and what the image had reminded the expectant parents of. But none of these names really hit the nail on the head for us.
I also went online to seek inspiration, and found some fun possibilities like “bumpkin” or “squirt”, and even came across a hilarious story of one expectant mom who started calling her baby “Damian” from The Omen because she had such bad morning sickness!
Then one day, while Tim and I were cruising along in our car, I suggested the nickname “bubbles”. Now, we have a silly way of pronouncing things between us, like a private joke, and we like to pronounce bubble tea as “bouble tea” (like Michael “Buble”). And suddenly, there we had it! Our baby’s fetal name: Boubbles! (pronounced “boob-els”, first part like the “Bub” in “Buble”, second part like “els” as in “bubbles”)
It is quite a milestone to give a name to your baby, even if it’s just a fetal name. Somehow, it really helps us connect to our baby, and we love to use the name to talk to him or her. My parents also love how silly yet endearing it sounds, and they like to ask us how Boubbles is doing. Sometimes, we wonder if we’ll get so used to it that we might continue calling the kid “Boubbles” long after he or she is born!
Posted on : March 7, 2011
Filed under : Mums- & Dads-to-be, Uncategorized
7 Comments
Mandy
March 13th, 2011 at 4:22 pm
Hahaha thanks Dan! Yep I also realised Boubbles’ nickname CANNOT be used in short-form!
Dannie
March 13th, 2011 at 2:18 am
Stop. Shh…. you had me at boob… 🙂
Mandy
March 10th, 2011 at 1:57 am
Hi Alex, I really wonder what Boubbles will think if we really used that nickname on him or her, especially when Boubbles is much older! Haha we’ll see!
Mandy
March 9th, 2011 at 12:37 pm
Hey Jesz, haha that’s funny! Yep we’re also preparing a few possible boy and girl names, but I guess we won’t know if it’ll really fit too, until we finally see Boubbles face-to-face!
jesz
March 8th, 2011 at 2:05 pm
we also din wanna knw the gender of our 1st born & name was much simpler – bb lim
we prepared 2 lists of names (1boy, 1girl) but used none in the end cos none seemed to fit after bb lim came out….!!!! so much for planning…
Celine
March 8th, 2011 at 5:40 am
Such a lovely nickname – Boubbles!! Sure beat mine anytime, Junior! Waiting in anticipation for the arrival of Boubbles 🙂
Alexandra
March 8th, 2011 at 1:51 am
Good idea to use Boubbles after baby’s born, cos there are enough ‘ti ti’s (little brother) and ‘mei mei’s (little sister) around! 🙂