Stepha-Roo and Gwendolyn Too!: Name Guilt

You know the fun of bringing home a pet and naming it? Sometimes it's easy. When I was 16ish, I told Mom that whenever we got another pet, I was going to name it Gizmo- fish, cat, dog, I didn't care. Shortly after this declaration, we got to the river house, and there was a little orange cat in the yard. It was clearly our Gizmo, who went on to live a long and happy life on the farm. The name worked for her, and I never questioned it. Years later, I brought Boston home. I had him for several days before I could come up with a name. I tried Lazlo, a la Real Genius, but it just didn't stick. Finally, I came up with Boston because he was black and white and so annoyingly dog-like. A few months later after I started dating Kevin, Kevin said that he thought Boston's real name was Pork Chop, which did seem right, but the name ship had sailed. All of this to say that I think we really missed the boat on naming our most recent pet, Fatty. Fatty was a small caterpillar that Kevin found in the garden for Stephanie. She helped him capture Fatty and put him in a jar with fennel. They covered the top of the jar with a very porous fabric, and periodically freshened his food. I named him Fatty right away because he was, as promised in that wonderful book, a very hungry caterpillar. Within a handful of days, he turned into a chrysalis, which, as far as I can tell, is a fancy man word for cocoon that is harder to spell and harder to pronounce correctly, thus making it the preferred term. The name Fatty was still working for me, though. Well, this morning, Kevin called upstairs that Fatty was a butterfly. He rushed the jar upstairs to us, and we told Stephanie that we were going to set him free. She thought to go out onto the deck of our bedroom and not back downstairs, which was really funny to me, because I forget that deck exists, and she came up with the idea just seconds ahead of Kevin. At first, Fatty the butterfly (and this is where I am having a hard time with the name Fatty) looked a little deflated and unsure about flying, and we were afraid he/she wasn't going to make it Stephanie was nonplussed, she merely said "I get new Fatty". Fortunately, with a little rest, Fatty took off flying just wonderfully. I hope Fatty has a good life, and maybe doesn't hate us for such an inappropriate moniker.