Quite a few people have been asking us what we’ve been calling the baby during the pregnancy. Since we won’t even know the gender for at least another month or two, it’s a little early for us to start seriously considering what to eventually name the little one. That said, it feels weird to call him/her “it,” and “baby” sounds too generic. When we first found out I was pregnant, Dan just jokingly referred to it as “zygote” during the early stages. (I know — how geeky, right?)

Since then, however, we’ve been getting weekly pregnancy updates from sites like BabyCenter and TheBump as well as from Kaiser Permanente’s weekly pregnancy e-newsletter, and each give an overview of how the fetus is growing and changing that week, as well as about how large it has gotten in size. The funny thing is that these e-newsletters often use fruits and vegetables as a visual comparison of the size of the developing baby. (You can see an overall timeline here.)  We thought it was cute, and started adopting the fruit/vegetable of the week as the nickname. So the name changes every week, but it’s been fun for us to update the name weekly, and it has also been a helpful reminder of how much our baby has grown. As of Friday, it’s a lemon, at 14 weeks. Last week it was a peach, and before that a plum, and prior to that a lime, and so on….

Our conversations over the past couple of months have regularly included comments like “Has the olive been behaving?” and “The plum looks more like you from the ultrasound.” It made me chuckle the other day to get a text message from Dan saying, “I’m going grocery shopping for you and the peach. What do you guys want to eat?” We know that our nicknaming system is pretty dorky, and we’re not sure how much our unborn baby appreciates it, but we have to find some way to entertain ourselves during these long 9-10 months, right? So there you have it — this week, you can call it “lemon.”