On not thinking nicknames through...

My daughter is a big baby.  She weighed 9lb 10oz at birth and has been over the 90th percentile for everything ever since. It's possible she might yet balance out, but all the signs are that she's going to stay tall with a proportionate build.

Her size has always baffled us to say the least.  I'm short and skinny (the one perk of my screwed up hormones), my husband is average erring on thin, my son is short...  We all have big heads, but you get the general family picture.  I have a couple of risk factors for gestational diabetes, but I passed my glucose tolerance test with flying colours.  Oh, and based on my daughter's every other physical attribute, we're quite certain there wasn't a mix-up of embryos.  She's most certainly the product of our genes, just... enlarged.

Whenever I thought of having a potential daughter, I imagined a dainty little girl.  Instead, we got a solid powerhouse who looked twice the size of the other babies in the hospital nursery.  As I said, I was baffled... but there was also a perverse part of me that was tickled to death.  One of the things that had always bothered me about raising a girl was how to avoid falling into gender-based expectations.  This girl was defying them from the start.

So I immediately dubbed her the "Crushinator", or "Our most beautiful robot daughter" as the less psychologically-scarring alternative.  This name has stuck around, being used with increasing affection over the past ten months.

Of course, the inevitable has happened: our son has started saying: "C'ushinator!"  Which is ridiculously cute, but in the long term, I think Little Miss Crushinator would prefer that we nipped this in the bud.  True, it's almost certain that she'll be bigger than her brother in just a few more years, but I'm guessing that won't help her feelings about the name.


It's not easy giving up a nickname... and my husband, being a Futurama fan, has grown quite attached to it.  But then I googled it while trying to see if Crushinator onesies exist, and I discovered that it has an urban dictionary definition that our daughter definitely won't thank us for!  So farewell, Crushinator, but you will always have a special place in our hearts.  And I would still totally buy the onesies if I ever found some.