Go Get Your Jacket

Naming consultants make the big bucks, right?

What are the new Zutano prints this winter? I'd love to get her a couple of those soft, comfy, long-wearing dresses. We used to have some and they were great. What have we got?

I was hoping for rocketships (she had those when she was a baby) but these kitty-cats are fairly cute. What is the name of that pattern?

Oh. Oh dear. Furry Love? Really?

Furry love?

I love Zutano but maybe they ought to start consulting me before they name their new lines next time. 

Too cool for preschool

To the left there is an item listed (accurately) as a "toddler leisure suit" on a generally pretty cute site called Babywit. It pisses me off. There is such a thing as just too goddamned  air-quotey and cool and statement-making, especially at the expense of an innocent preschooler. Nobody wants to wear that, and it's not fair if you're too little to get the joke.

There's a couple in my neighborhood I have developed an irrational love for, solely based on their not forcing their helpless baby girl to meet their own obviously very high mutual standard of outsidery cool.  He is big and has those huge stupid distended ear-hole things and a goofy hat and tats up and down and sideways; she has white-girl dreads and affects the bag lady-by-choice look with the long johns under multiple skirts and the combat boots. Their well-scrubbed, cherub-faced toddler, meanwhile, wears normal little dresses or jeans, without a message-y or self-consciously hip item in sight. Yesterday at the farmer's market she wore a fuzzy brown jacket with bear's ears. I bet they named her something only passably hipstery, Rosie or Maeve or something. I'm afraid to ask, though, in case it's Diablo or Jinx or Rocky and I have to start hating them too.  

A life in names

My non-invisible friend Lila (if you've met people in real life it doesn't matter if you mostly see them online, they are no longer invisible) posted about being charmed by the names in "Sammy The Seal," the 1959 classic by New Yorker cartoonist Syd Hoff, which she was reading with her toddler daughter:

"Is it you, Joey? 

Is it you, Helen? 

Is it you, Dorothy, Robert, Fred, Joan, or Agnes?" 

I can't say I remember running into any little Agneses in my cohort, nor any Helens, and certainly no Dorothys. That whole list dates from Hoff's childhood--  mine would be all Scotts and Lisas. I certainly remember Sammy, though, and his even more famous cousin(?) Danny The Dinosaur. 

I also remember what all this is reminding me of, this delightful post by Laura Wattenberg, name nerd of all name nerds.

Tammis? I love it, but, really, Tammis? Now that I don't remember ever seeing before, but I never saw that Scarry book either (a childhood lacking in Christmas books, I suppose). I'd remember Tammis. I did run into a little Tamsin in the park not long ago, and thought, simultaneously, "Love love love!"  and, "Oh, honestly."  

Hey, it's better than "Braydon.."

I've been collecting the names that the various kidstuff catalogs use on their personalizable items (mostly fairly classic with a few oddities), so you can see how this image, from Magic Cabin, gave me a bit of a start:

In a world filled with tiny female Coopers, Chandlers, Parkers, and even Cutters (Seriously, I recently heard of a classroom in Texas with not one but two little Cutters), hell, why not Seymour?

As for Magic Cabin itself, they sell the sort of good-for-you goods, tin pails and wooden blocks and play-forts and old-fashioned marble races, which I'm guilty of longing for (and occasionally buying) without ever being completely clear on *whose* idyllic childhood I'm trying to (re)create, my own or my children's.