Naming rights

Before having kids, you tell yourself you will not let your children greatly alter your life. Then, you have kids, and you do not realize how much they dictate your world until you are too far gone. Small realizations about how you talk or what you do hit you in the face, and you realize you are merely pawns in your children’s lives.

Take, for example, when I am out with other adults, and instead of using age-appropriate words like “restrooms” or “facilities,” I announce to the group, out of habit, that I need to go potty. Insert immediate regret and embarrassment, but those words are common in our household and therefore spill over into everyday life outside our home. At this point, I do not think my brain will relearn certain adult ways of speaking, but I kind of want to hold onto the potty phrase and use that in public with my boys when they are teenagers.

The farm is not safe from the children’s influence, either. When my oldest, Hayes, was very young, he insisted on stating the name of something or someone plus the noun it was associated with. Our farm dog, Chip, was soon referred to as Chip Dog by Hayes, so now all of us call him that. I’m sure visitors to the farm over the last eight years are a bit baffled when we grown adults refer to Chip Dog in conversation. Calling him just Chip doesn’t even feel right now.

Nash, my youngest, has taken it upon himself to rename all the tractors. We no longer refer to them by their model number but instead by their main duty. There’s the planter tractor, chopper tractor, bucket tractor and so on. The planter tractor is still the planter tractor, even if pulling the manure spreader. I don’t think I could identify the tractor based on its model number anymore. For a while, when Hayes was little, he called all tractors Ts, so we used that language in regular conversation for a short time.

What starts out as a fun way to interact with your kids quickly turns into a habit that is hard to shake. Honestly, it is just easier to use the words or phrases your kids use because they end up correcting you every time you do not call something what they think it should be called.

Fields are their next victim. The field designations we use have had the same name since before my existence, often named after a location or person who originally owned it and is no longer living. The first to fall victim to the rename was what was originally referred to as “the other farm.” This is absolutely ridiculous, since it has no logical reference point for most people outside our family, but it has now been rebranded by Nash as the “field across from the horse farm,” because that’s what it is — across the road from a farm with horses. It is much more logical, in my opinion. I hope that one sticks.

I don’t yet trust them to name any of the cows. I have dipped into my parental trickery book and found that, if I come up with a few names I like and then give them the choice between them, that will often suffice. It makes it feel like it was their idea. Names like Licky, Stinky Pants or Silly Goose would probably fill our barns if the boys were in charge. A few of the cats fell victim to the kids’ naming schemes before I could jump in, but Fuzzy, Sunny and Fred aren’t too bad for the barn cats.

Who knows what’s next, but part of me longs to hold on to the innocence of their names and phrases. Before long, I am sure they will be using teenage slang that I will not find so amusing.

Jill is a stay-at-home mom who helps part time on her family’s 140-cow dairy farm near Forest City, Minnesota. She and her husband, Aaron, have two children: Hayes and Nash.