The Name Game

Here at AddProb we are not keen on naming offspring in utero. For one thing, what if little Hepzebah Marie pops out and you take one look at her and she's CLEARLY Millicent Bathsheba? You've got to make all those phone calls, return all that monogrammed stuff, and retrain your tongue. Two, we also are not likely to find out the gender of any child we carry (though the final vote has not been tallied on this issue, in part because the legislature has not determined what to do about tie votes). And if you don't know the gender it's a little trickier to pre-name. Finally, and most importantly, it totally freaks us out on a superstitious level. Naming a baby, and using that name, before the baby is born seems like a HUGE invitation for trouble. We know that lots of people feel differently, and that's fine for them and their babies. We just choose differently for ourselves.

However, many of you have asked why we refer to our future child as Harpo. No, we don't know it's a boy. We're not obsessed with Oprah* or the Marx brothers. We don't plan on actually naming our child Harpo, and if we did we wouldn't be referring to him/her by name yet. But we've got to call him/her something. The reason is simply this:

Ummm...It sounds good with embryo. Harpo the Embryo. Dunno, worked for us.

*Jen was like, "Huh?" She didn't know "Harpo" is "Oprah" spelled backwards! Nor did she know anything about her production company. See what happens when you don't watch TV and you don't have cable?