Purple prose

Even before I started this blog, the nicknames my wife and I applied to our son were many and varied. And usually utterly ridiculous. You would be forgiven for thinking that we didn’t actually like his legal moniker, that he had been christened in honor of a revered ancestor for familial-political reasons despite the fact that said name was old-fashioned and uncool, but that’s not the case at all. His middle name is his great-grandfather’s name, a name which my father and I also have as middle names and which I could conceivably have lobbied for as a first name. My son’s first name, on the other hand, is one my wife and I agreed on as a good one, distinctive without being weird, unambiguously male, and we’ve never regretted it. We just really, really love goofy nicknames, too.

Early on there were periods where the baby was referred to as “Spitsy” or “Snotsy” depending on which bodily fluid was being expressed most abundantly at the time. (It seemed abundant to us, at least, though I admit in hindsight it was probably average.) We were also fond of combining moods with “pants” as appropriate, thus making “Crankypants”, “Fussypants” and “Crazypants” frequent appellations. At least all of those are logical and easily explained.

Slightly more complicated is “Viktor Voot”, a bizarre expression which may or may not survive the process of inside joke explication, but let’s give it a shot anyway. Some of the responsibility, of course, lies with SportsCenter. One of the “This is SportsCenter” commercials which particularly struck the funny bone of my wife and myself is based on the premise of Dan Patrick and Kenny Mayne re-recording SportsCenter for international markets, including costume changes and foreign language translation. The anchors don sombreros and ponchos, lederhosen, and Russian garb complete with large fur hats. In the Russian bit the anchors intro themselves, and Mayne deadpans to the camera: “Voot Kenny Maynski.” (Voot presumably being Russian for “I am called” or something like that. I’m certain it’s spelled differently.) “Voot” is just such a fun syllable to utter that it quickly accompanied the action of picking up the baby (usually with a kind of slide-whistle intonation). As the baby became more mobile, it was also useful as a catch-all verb for his locomotion, be it crawling, scooting, cruising, and so forth. Since my wife is a veterinarian, “scoot” has some arguably negative dog-related connotation, so we were just as happy to have our own nonsense word for it. It continues to prove useful even now, because to us it captures just how slippery and quick the little guy is. If, for example, one of us is cooking and the other is reading, and the cook happens to notice the little guy on the move towards danger and wants to get the other’s attention, it’s highly likely the phrase “Your son just vooted right up the stairs” will be employed.

Now right around the time we were integrating “voot” into our vocabulary, we had to replace the water heater in the old townhouse. The contractor who came to install the new heater had a heavy Eastern European accent and dropped a few hilarious pearls while he was on the job. E.g., wanting to know the sex of our baby, he asked, “Izzit man … or voman?” (That gag still gets repeated a lot, too.) Somehow the contractor was dubbed “Viktor” in our minds, but (suckers for alliteration that we are) that name also quickly migrated towards our little vooter, and hence “Viktor Voot.”


I think that might be my favorite of the nicknames if only for the sense of action it conveys (if you speak the language of our household, at least). It’s like “Johnny Quick” or “Mike Hammer” in the way it gets right to the point. It is, to say the least, apt. If “Voot” is meant to convey uncontainable exuberance in perpetual motion, my son has taken that name and owned it fully. He is a little pistol.

I say that with no small amount of pride, of course, not in the my-kid-is-soooo-exceptional sense but more in the my-kid-is-my-kid sense of a kind of biological pride. There are of course downsides to raising a willful, spirited little heck-raising dervish. My wife and I have gotten slap-punched in the face more times than we can count, which is hardly ever a toddler rebuke of our authority or anything, it’s just what happens when he gets a little overexcited and interacts with his environment primarily via flailing. And then there’s the breath holding.

Well ahead of schedule, the little guy is eyeball-deep in the temper tantrum phase. And much like he doesn’t just get around, but rather voots like lightning, similarly he doesn’t just kick and scream, he freaks out with the focused totality of his being. He tenses up as tightly as if he’s trying to contain an explosion that would level every house on the cul-de-sac. And while he’s doing this, he does not inhale. And while he’s not inhaling, he sometimes turns purple. Again, lest you think I am exaggerating for the sake of making my own life seem ultra-thrilling, he freaked out and held his breath at daycare recently and the minders were sufficiently disturbed to call in paramedics.

The little guy was fine, and remains fine. The paramedics suggested a follow-up doctor’s visit, a directive my wife complied with, and the doctor assured her that some kids (a small minority of “some”, but still) just kind of do that for a while, and grow out of it. The doctor even provided some official-looking literature on the subject, which was useful both for convincing the day care center that our child didn’t need a MedAlert bracelet or special diet or anything, and not coincidentally for reassuring me and my wife that our child was not risking brain damage or otherwise in for a rough road ahead. It’s just one of those things.

Last night I was putting the little guy through the going-to-bed ritual and had him well settled on my lap with his bedtime stuffed animal (a plush lion I have recently taken to calling Kenny Mane because I am all about the callback). He normally gets a small baby bottle as a snack but I tried last night to pour the bottle into a cup and offer him that instead. He was not ready for that kind of change in the routine, and the next thing I knew he was rigid with fury and purpling rapidly. My medical-literature-processing brain knew that not only was thing just one of those things, but it was a thing I could do nothing about. Either he would remember to breathe, or he would pass out and then breathe autonomically. All I could do was hold him in such a way that if he did pass out he wouldn’t crack his head open collapsing into something. As it happened, he unclenched of his own accord and breathed consciously, although he seemed a little woozy. At which point my instinctual brain, unmoved by pediatric journals with their rational clinical detachment and whatnot, also finally unclenched.

The simultaneously comforting and challenging thing about being a parent is keeping in mind that most kids – your own included – are normal, and similar. The things your kid goes through are neither new nor unique … most of the time. But while most kids will have most of their attributes fall along the median most of the time, it’s also normal for a kid to have a couple of things that are way outside the 50th percentile, and one or two of those things can be undiluted awesome, and one or two of those things can be extremely challenging. But in the big picture, my kid needs me not to get too bogged down by the challenges, and not to get overly enamored with the awesomeness (sublimation through excessive nicknaming is, one would hope, permissible), and not to take any of the rest for granted. It takes a lot out of me, but that’s what I’m striving for, hoping to build up some reserves of endurance for it sometime in the next sixteen and a half years.