What is in a name?

I am often surprised at people's reaction when they ask me, "What is his name?"
It ranges from "so cute" to "you named him Oliver?" This is simply why I chose not to share our child's name with anyone until he had entered the world. I did however, test it out on the general public before I had him. And well, it infuriated me most of the time.

We really weren't sure what we were going to name him until we met him. We had two names in mind (and no I'm not telling what the other was). Nate came home with the name one day and to be honest, it took me a little while to warm up to it. I didn't know any "Olivers," and thought 3-syllables was a mouthful to say. Obviously, I began to love it as much as Nate by the time he was born.

Which brings me to one infuriating story from me "testing his name out."

One day I decided to buy some letters to hang in his nursery a couple days before he was born. I threw the scrambled letters on the counter as the women began to check me out. She had what I call a"smokers-cough," and coughed with her mouth open into the air. I was thankful for the three feet of distance between us, but I admit that I held my breath for a little while afterwards hoping not to inhale her coughing particles. This was the beginning of my annoyance of her.

"What's this spell," she asked. "Love?"

"No, it spells Oliver," I said.

"Oliver-who's Oliver?" She managed to say this phrase with a bit of disgust in her voice. As if she knew the answer to her question already.

"He's my soon-to-be son," I said pointing to my round belly.

"You are going to name that sweet baby Oliver? How could you do that?"

Note: For those of you who want to comment to a 9 months pregnant woman about anything, be sure to make it positive. Otherwise you can ruin her entire day, week, or month of pregnancy.

"I mean," she continued, "that must be a family name or something for you to come up with Oliver."

Me, a bit dumbfounded by her bluntness, "my husband came up with it."

She handed me my letters as I finished checking out. I started to fume.

'Smoker cough into the air lady' turned to the next person in line and said, "can you believe she would name her baby that?"

I slammed the door on the way out of the store......okay, that part I made up, but I wanted to slam the door if it would have let me.

And said to myself, " I will name my baby whatever I want, and could care less what ANYONE ELSE thinks."

What is in a name? Nobody else's business is what's in a name. Okay, there I said it.

The end.