On Nicknames, Monsters, and Robot Reproduction

Exciting nicknames have never been my strong point. It seems there's only so much one can do with "Jennifer Johnson." Most grownup folks call me Jen these days, unless you're chatting with me online for Etsy, which leads to the predictable handle of "Mama." Hardly inspired, I know, and merely one more variation on the Mama/Mommy/Moooooom! label, which I get called most of all, given that BJ and BB use it heaven knows how many times a day. When I was teaching, I was "Miz J." If you knew me before I was 5 years old, you can get away with calling me Jenny. For a brief, ill-advised time in middle school, there was a halfhearted attempt made at "Jeffer." I know, I know. Hardly the stuff of which memorable monikers are made.

Finally, thanks to playing pirates with my son yesterday, I have a nickname to be proud of. He dubbed himself "Bad Head" and then asked me what I should be called. I made the (admittedly rather lame) suggestion of "Big Mama."

"No," he said. "You can't be that. Pirates don't have mommies." And then he went on to dub me Bad Bully McMeanie.

Even S was jealous of that one when I told him!

But that's OK, because I'm kind of jealous of the book that BJ made for S. S has been gearing up to play Dungeons and Dragons again, after a hiatus of a good 15 years (which is the worthy subject of another post entirely, actually) and his preparations are really interesting to the kids. Minis! Books with neat pictures! Monster manuals! It's all very cute. Over the weekend, BJ made S a book called "Masters of the Dungeon," in which he created an alphabetical list of all the monsters he had imagined along with scribbled drawings. My favorite: N is for Nut-nu. And lest anybody be worried, he made sure to inform us that all of his monsters are friendly and will help fight off the bad monsters. So there you go.

One other thing I wanted to note about BJ's quirky creativity this week. He was holding forth at length a few days ago in the car, telling us all about the robots that he was going to create when he became a scientist. I don't remember even half of the details that came from his imagination in a torrential rush -- but I do recall the gist of his explanation about how the robots would make baby robots. It would involve a worm and a rock, and the mommy or daddy robot would somehow ingest these, and it would make a little baby robot. Interesting symbolism, eh? To my knowledge, he's not yet been given any "birds and bees" facts about sperm and egg. (I sure hope that at age 4 he's not getting that information from anywhere other than conversations with me or S, and I know we've not mentioned it yet.) Almost enough to make ya believe in a collective unconscious, isn't it?