We were having coffee with Jane at the Chocolate Fish cafe, sitting at the outside tables by the beach and over the road from the cafe itself.  Hitomi was about to burst, so it must have been late August. A wonderful late winter’s day in Wellington, with beautiful sunlight and a nasty wind-chill factor.

We got on to the topic of whether ‘it’ was a boy or a girl. For most of the pregnancy both of us had been, in traditional fashion, very coy when the topic arose. By this time, however, with only a couple of weeks to go until the due date we were less guarded. We told Jane that ‘it’ was a girl, and the talk naturally moved to names.

Up until then we had also been a bit coy with regard to telling people our likely picks for baby names, just in case they were ‘baby name robbers’, who wanted to steal the outstanding baby name we had fretted over for such a long time and give it to their own babies. Anyway, at this point, we figured that telling Jane our great baby name idea was no big deal.

“Mimi,” I said.

”I beg your pardon?” came Jane’s puzzled reply.

“‘Mimi’ is our current favourite,” I said. “We want something that is short, cute, and sounds good in English as well as Japanese.”

Hitomi explained. “We want something that the kid will be happy with, regardless of whether we are living here or back in Japan. The word ‘mimi’ means ‘ear’ in Japanese, but we would use different characters to give it a different meaning. Japanese people wouldn’t think ‘ear’ when they called her name.”

“Oh,” said Jane.

“It’s easy for both Japanese people and English speakers to pronounce,” I added.

“Where do you see yourselves living in the future?” Jane asked.

“Not really sure,” we said in unison.

“Well,” started Jane. “If you think she might be going through the school system here in New Zealand, then you might want to think of a different name.”

“Why do you say that,” I asked.

“Well, when we were at school in the seventies and eighties, we would learn a bit of Maori language, right? Greetings and things, yeah?”

She was right. Learning some Maori words had been part of the curriculum for a long time. Every New Zealander can smuggly rattle off the numbers one to ten, and feel like they are exhibiting a high degree of prowess in the native language.

“So?” I queried.

“Well, things have moved on,” said Jane. ” In some schools, the kids even end up being able to hold a decent conversation in Maori.”

“OK,” I said. “So what has this got to do with our choice of baby names?” I asked.

Well,” started Jane again. “Nowadays, every seven year old in the country knows that ‘mimi’ means ‘urinate’ in Maori.”

by Mia’s dad
Dubai, United Arab Emirates