Spice Babies! Spice Girls! Am I going to ruin my children's lives?
I have a strange, overwhelming, unrelenting, probably psychologically indicative urge to name all of my future children after spices and herbs. It started out as a joke, because so many Mormon families have themed children. I personally have known 4 children all named after presidents (Reagan, Kennedy, Jefferson, and I forget the last one) and a family of 8 or 9 kids whose names all started with Js.
I used to joke that I would spices and herbs for my future bushel of children (because for years I used to wish my mom had named me Sage). And I sort of got carried away from there.
I imagine my future children something like this:
Most of those are terrible names, really. And they would all have normal, respectable middle names, and maybe I'd even use the spice/herb as a middle name for a few to make it less kitschy.
The more I thought about it and jokingly justified it to people, the more the little seed of planning planted itself into my mind and started germinating.
And then I found out that Caraway is a family name on Husband’s side, which is basically a sign. I am meant to have nominal spice children.
Obviously, they’d have to be mostly girls because, let’s face it, there are just more cute girl spice names then boy spice names. And this way, we could call them the Spice Girls instead of the Spice Babies or the Spice Children, which I’m sure at least the parents my age would appreciate. And maybe my kids would forgive me eventually and start speaking to me again after a few decades.
The only thing that might halt my rampage is the classic "Namesake" assignment everyone gets in 5th grade. For this assignment I learned that my parents picked my first name because they thought it was pretty and they spelled it funny because they didn't know how to spell it and they didn't have Google back then. But my middle name is a close family member that I adore, so that makes me feel all familial and proud of my name and my heritage.
How would my Spice Children feel? One name was chosen because it fit into the nominal family spice cupboard, and the other was chosen mostly because it was pretty and matched the spice name and also might coincidentally be a distant family name.
Maybe I should save my future children and just go check out a Baby Name book from the library and start reading from cover to cover. They'll thank me later.
But seriously. My girl-children are probably going to get spice names anyway. I've given this way too much thought to just ignore it.