Of Names and Nipples

She’s lying on the bed, looking up at the ceiling.

“My nipples are really sore” was the greeting. She lay there half-laughing and crossing her arms under her breasts to support them.

“They ache here,” she said, pointing along the side of her body near the armpits. I looked.

Her breasts had clearly grown much larger in the last few days. My guess is 15-20% larger. “Vingt percent en plus! Gratuit!” I tease.

She explained that she read on the internet (the fount of all truths) that for the first trimester (3 months!) her breasts will be uncomfortable and swelling as “my breasts get used to the hormones.” She was talking about them as though they were little creatures that were not part of her body.

“Wow. They’re huge,” was my helpful response. “Do you want me to help you hold them?”

She declines and fights off any attempts at me touching her anywhere near her chest. I notice that her skin feels different – smoother, softer. Her face and neck look slimmer than before, but it could be the tan. Or it could be that they’re now contrasted against much larger boobs so it’s just an illusion. And yes, they are definitely larger.

She doesn’t think she looks any thinner, but that’s not a surprise.

“What do you think of Louis?” she asks, but I don’t understand what she’s asking. “Louis, L-O-U-I-S” she repeats a couple of times before I get it.

“What? No! Not Lewis or Louis, I have bad memories about someone with that name.”

She points at her drawer and I open it. She pulls out a little notebook where she’s been jotting down names for boys and girls.

Sam. Carl. Gaulthier. Cyril. Xavier. Eric. Quentin. Luc. Marc. Philip. Pierre. Margot. Louise. Audry. Lauren. Adrienne. Chloe. Emma. Ines. Adele. Alice. Kiera.

Holy crap. Can’t she think of any NORMAL names? She’s trying to find names that work both in English and French, but these are pretty bad. Our kid’s going to grow up with a complex. Or turn out to be some homosexual coffee-house psychologist. Or need one.

I tell her that, and she ignores me. I tell her I don’t want to think about this until at least we’re closer to her popping. Really, to me you want to meet the little smurf before you name it. You have to get a feel for what it wants to be named.

Did I just write that airy-fairy crap? I think I need a good dose of beer to set me right.

As a nice little addendum to our name discussion, she tells me that about now the organs should be starting to form. Not sure what my response should be.

I can tell it’s going to be a long summer.