Nicknames

So how did you name your kids? What nicknames do you or they have and how did they get them and lastly do you like them? Nicknames are difficult sometimes it something simple that just ends up sticking, like "guy" and often it's ok. But how you deal with it or what do you do if you don't like the nickname that someone has given you or your children. When we named Abigail we knew and still do know that some day if she chooses she may be an Abbey (with any various spellings) and at the time we liked that. However now we always call her Abigail and can't imagine ever calling her anything differently. I often wonder when others call her Abbey if she even knows they're talking to her or what she thinks of a name she's not used to being called. I'm almost surprised that she doesn't correct them, becuase she tends to correct everyone about almost everything including when we call Zoey by any of the random nicknames that we have for her. Many of the nicknames that we do have for Abigail are very random and we don't even really know where they came from and it's odd for me to hear others use these nicknames for her even though we do.

So this time around knowing how bothered I get or how I just don't think Abbey fits Abigail for a nickname we put a lot of thought into the boys names--trying to find names that didn't have nicknames per say. In fact it's one of the reasons we ruled out some names that we really liked. However we quickly found some nicknames for the boys as did others. Ryan is my "Little Dude" and Justin is my "Little Man" although I really call both of them both names. The other thing that I've caught myself doing, is saying can you get me "the other one". It's something I must say I'm not proud of because it would be so much nicer to say can you get me "his brother" or even use their names--Guy is much better at this than I am. What really made me think of this again was when I put them in Thing 1 and Thing 2 onesies--very cute, but not really nice I suppose, especially since I'm trying to get better about using their names. I guess even though Guy and I both go by our nicknames it's odd to say that I typically don't really like nicknames. Yet there are the small few that we've chosen for the kiddos that change over time and as new ones emerge the old ones are hopefully left behind but not forgotten.