What’s in a name? There are entire books written on the subject. I read once that the names you choose for your kids are mostly about the image you’re trying to project as parents. I never really could wrap my head around why our boys ended up with old-timey biblical names with short modern nicknames, until upon further reflection, I admitted that James and I are all about old antiquey things with a modern sensibility. And there it is.
Now our new pointer puppies, Lightning and Piper, were formerly known as Lightning and Lambchop. And of course given the fate of our foodie namesake chicken, Chicken Nugget, we could not have any squirmy little puppies roaming around with tasty nicknames. Plus Lightning and Piper shorten to Lights and Pipes, and based on our life of self-inflicted, perpetual house projects, that just seems fitting.
Given Jacob and I are eyeball deep in our seventh Percy Jackson book, I looked to these exciting tales of teenage, Greek demigods for inspiration. How about Percy and Piper?? How cute would that be? Guys? Hey guys?
Despite the two-pronged trident on her forehead and thus her potential lineage to Poseidon, Zeus won-out and Lightning stayed Lightning. Plus Granddad reasoned, it’s not a good idea to have two dogs with the same syllable starting their name. You get confused when yelling at your dogs… I mean the dogs get confused. Which is exactly why his puppies evolved from Butterfly and Bullet to McFly and Bullet to MacFly and Geronimo to Mac and Mo. The “M” in Mo is more of a soft n…
I can totally picture Granddad’s exact response to that bit of teenage sarcasm.
The same weekend when Lightning and Piper joined our family and tipped the scales in favor of girls rule, boys drool, Chicken Sando also got two new beautiful step sisters.
Now these chickens, these new chickens are something else. They are fluffy and pristine fashion model chickens. One wears those fringed boots I see babies wearing on Instagram. They prance around and roll their eyes at James and flip their hair like girls on the CW. Meanwhile Sando is friendly and fun-loving and down-to-earth. She’s a bohemian who loves to roll in the dirt and once jumped on top of a garbage can to peer eagerly into the dining room window. She’s a people chicken.
Sando is Cinderella… before the ball. Covered in ashes and sand and looking a bit like she was just attacked and had all her ribbons ripped off by two evil stepsisters.
Fittingly, I floated the names Anastasia and Drizella, but I couldn’t get a single taker. Instead the boys have named them Princess and Perfect. Hard to argue with that.
Yesterday we spent close to an hour trying to get Princess and Perfect to come up the hill and go back into the coop so we could go to the movies to watch Coco. Sando was the perfectly little trained puppy we wish our puppies would be. Meanwhile Princess and Perfect kept flouncing down the hill, further and further into the depths of Tartarus (sorry, another Percy Jackson reference).
Jacob has a lot of poultry practice planned with these two prissy pea-brains. Another night like last night, and they’ll be remembered as Dinner and Dessert.