The first in my list of baby questions I’ve gotten over the last few weeks.

Why do you call the baby Optimus Prime?

One of my jobs in life is to torment the Husband. I’m very, very good at it. Just ask him, when he’s not sitting in a corner rocking himself, mumbling, “Marshmallow hamsters eat stereos.” Pretty much since we were married, one of the games I would force him to play is name our child. I would come up with these random names and suggest them for our offspring. For example, “Hey the Husband, you know what would be a good name? Bubba Joe Ourlastname. Do you like it? Hey! if we have twins, they could be Bubba Joe and Bubba Jean Ourlastname. What do you think?” To which he would shake his head, wonder why the heck he married me, and tell me no. I’ve tried various names during the 11 years we’ve been married from Charlemagne to Virginity to Baba Ganoush.

So after the first Transformers movie you can bet I turned to the Husband and said, “You know, Optimus Prime Ourlastname would be a really cool baby name.” Now the Husband is a huge Transformers fan from childhood and instead of saying no, he realized the sheer genius of it. And if we had twins, Optimus Prime and Megatron would be perfect! They’d be mortal enemies! We spent hours discussing the implications of what a great name it was…Okay, we didn’t. But the Husband did laugh and say that the name would actually work.

Now, I may be many, many things and some of what I am is crazy, but I would never traumatize my child with some of the names I’ve come up with in the past. And that includes Optimus Prime. However, I realized that while the baby is cooking, so to speak, she needs a name and everyone uses bean, peanut, spawn, etc. I thought, why not call her Optimus Prime now. It’d be fun and we’d get less frowns with that than if I went with my first choice–the parasite. So Optimus Prime it became.

I should note that my parents actually are partially to blame for this. My dad named the Sister and I while we were in the womb after great Yankees of the 70s, and look how well we turned out! Oh, wait. Crap.