Nicknames

As someone who has a nickname, I never wanted any of my children to have one. I have an old fashioned name that no one under, oh, let's say 75 has anymore. I have always gone by a shortened version of it, which is still fairly unusual.

All my kids names were chosen carefully with the "no nickname" policy in mind. With my first three, no problem. Their names really don't have any other version or shortened form.

A few months after we got home with A, big Brother B started calling her "Ozzy". I glared and growled about it, but figured it would pass. It has instead, caught on. Increasingly these days, she is called, interchangably, "Ozzy", "Oz" and her given name, "Asrat". True confessions here, I have recently starting using them too. Egads!! The nannies at the care center used to call her "Ahs-ru" or "Ahs-ratti". She answers to them all. I'm hoping that when she formally starts school, we can go back to "Asrat". "Ozzy" just, well, isn't a name. And it seems to re-inforce to people that her name should be pronounced "Oz-rot", instead of "Ahs-rrot" (you hear an "s" sound, not a "z" sound.)