What's in a Name?

Originally posted 3/30/09


A couple of weeks ago Ian and I had a fairly long conversation about his full name. He was having trouble grasping the concept of a first, middle and last name.
For the longest time he thought I-A-N spelled all three of his names together. I was so impressed that he could spell Ian that I didn’t want to confuse him, so I didn’t try to correct him until a couple of weeks ago.
I walked away from that conversation convinced that he didn’t understand at all.

He has also been watching this cartoon called Ben 10. He is completely obsessed with it. It’s the only thing he wants to talk about and all he wants to do is watch it. Sometimes I get worried that he doesn’t use his imagination as much as he should so I try to get him to make up his own cartoon, but he would just rather watch Ben 10. There is a theater camp that we are taking him to with his cousins this summer. They put on plays and stuff, I’m not completely sure what it entails, but I think he will be using his imagination, so it sounds cool to me.
He will also be playing T-ball. I’m extremely excited about the summer. Probably more so than Ian.

Ian’s mom and I have given him stuffed animals since he was born. Every time I give him a new one I tell him to name it and he either wants to name it “Baby” or whatever it is, like “Puppy” or “Bear." I always discourage it and try to encourage him to think of something creative. For a week or two he wanted to name things “Batman” or “Robin," but i think being so creative began to wear him out, so he resorted back to the obvious names.

Last week I stopped by his Mom’s place to drop of some paperwork and Ian was sprawled on the floor watching Ben 10 with some of their friends. He got really excited that I was there, he started showing me things and hugging me over and over, telling me he loved me.
I felt really cool.
After I had been there for a little bit he grabbed my hand and pulled me to his room, telling me he wanted to show me something. He jumped on his bed and pulled a blue stuffed animal out from under his Cars blankets. It was a fuzzy baby blue hippopotamus that I got when I was born. There is a picture of me in the hospital with it. I had forgotten that it existed. As Ian was showing me, he told me the hippo’s name was Skeleton.
I asked him if he meant Skeletor – just to mess with him – then he told me that Skeletor was his last name, Skeleton was his middle name and Sket was his first name.

The next day Ian’s mom sent me a text telling me that Ian wanted to know what I used to call Skeleton when I was a kid.
After I read the message I realized that I never named him, I just called him “Hippo.”

I guess Ian can name his stuffed animals whatever he wants.