Its all in a name...

Naming animals has always been a challenge, and now we have rather a lot the choice appears to be getting smaller. There are several different ways to go about naming animals, however, the one thing I have learnt over the years is never leave this to your children. Small people always have a logic that is confusing, and your new pet will end up with a slightly bizarre on in our case strange names.

Now, we have had several animals over the years, with four children all wanting different pets, this lead to several hamsters, rabbits, guinea pigs, cats, dogs and fish being purchased. Added with the fact we now have the pig, goats, ducks and chickens to name our available choices are becoming limited. Especially as we have lost several animals along the way...

My daughter when she was younger wanted a hamster, mainly because her older brother had one, unfortunately, she was like the serial killer of small domestic animals, and although she didn't intentionally kill the 4 hamsters, 3 rabbits and 2 guinea pigs, we did stop purchasing her these animals. What they died of, we will never know, but one theory was it was due to the awful choice of name.

Allowing a small child to choose the name for the new pet is a disaster from the start, and we had the evidence. My daughter choose the most stupid names including sooty, fluffy, bowwow, cat, Cecil, and stew (for the rabbit) after several bad name choices, this role was taken over by our youngest son, who in all fairness didn't do much better.

Therefore, the naming role was deemed to be yet another mummy job, and through guidance the children think they choose the names, but thankfully a sensible adult is at hand (daddy) There is always logic behind the name, although this may not be evident at first. Our current animals are called.....Felix (cat food) Yoda (youngest son is mad on star wars and Darth didn't suit the white cat) and Diablo..(you only have to meet him to know why)

Jack and Jill the goats...well we did spend hours in the car debating names that went together, and they nearly became flip and flop! Peppa the pig, well bacon seemed a bit harsh, Billy, Lucy, Jessica, and Nellie (the cripple) again you have to meet the duck to understand..the other names, who knows what is good for a duck...hoppity and bunny although this changes on a daily basis...

Now, the chickens were harder to name, and with over 60 of them I do draw the line at naming all of them, however, it does make it easier when you are trying to have a conversation in the orchard. Or you end up going round in circles, so we ended up with Houdini (always escaping) domino (her sister and we preferred this to dynamo) vicious muma (trust me once encountered you will know why, although I often refer to her as that f**king chicken) honeybun (or bitch to her friends) we then have Ruthie, Mcfly, G and Mark (this is what happens when you allow friends to name the chicks) the thirteen (although there is only 12 now)

As with everything here in our mad world, Google is often used, alongside other technical methods such as "oh god I don't know" Thankfully we didn't have this much stress choosing our children's names, although there were some strange choices there as well...Thankfully when I came off the gas and air I realised Yasmine Summer was not a good choice for our daughter!