Travel Day
misty · Thu, Oct 29, 2015Today’s a heavy travel day, so I thought I’d (pre)write a blog post about how we decided on Milo’s name. Everyone asks, so I thought it would be good to record it.
Several years ago (circa 2011), Chase and I had been living together for a few months and began to talk about the future. Things between us have always been good, and I think we both knew pretty early on that this relationship was going somewhere. So, when talking about the future, we naturally began discussing marriage and children. When talking about future possible children, we thought immediately about an episode of This American Life in which the storyteller discusses his decision to refer to his future child as POTUS instead of “It”. We thought this was a good idea, so we started thinking about possible names to call our nonexistent baby.
Immediately, our conversation turned to literary references, and eventually we started talking about children’s books. My favorite is The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. We couldn’t very well call our future nonexistent child “Little Prince,” and there were no other names in the book. So, we turned to Chase’s favorite children’s book: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. The main character is Milo.
Milo. Yeah, we could call our baby that. Milo was a good character, and Milo was a name that could feasibly suit a boy or a girl. Milo was also the name of a character in Catch-22, which is a favorite novel for both of us. Milo is also the name of the cat in Milo and Otis, which I remember fondly as a very cute movie.
So, for several years before our girl joined us (before we even knew that our girl was a girl), we talked and talked about our little Milo. “Someday, we’ll take Milo to the zoo. Someday, Milo and I will take a long bike ride. What do you think it’ll be like when Milo sees the redwoods for the first time? Milo’s going to look just like you!” and so on.
By the time I became pregnant, Milo had been Milo for years. It would have felt wrong to call her anything else.