Milo - The Name

The last six weeks of our lives have been incredible. The Pudding that I had been carrying for nine months turned out to be Milo.

Lots of people have asked where we got the name from. The short answer is, we love it as a name. The longer answer is that we took ages to decide! Our girl name was done and dusted. Our boy name had narrowed down to two, with a third added the night before Milo was born.

The difficulty with Milo was that we loved it but Clarence was worried that if we had a boy he would get teased if his name was Milo. Two days before we had him our obstetrician asked what our names were. She liked the girl name but laughed at Milo and said "you can't call him that if he's a boy, he'll be Milo colored"! Hmmm. I nearly had it over the line! Clarence was concerned as well that in Zimbabwe Milo is a drink, not a name. We don't live in Zimbabwe and if you refer to my post of Zimbabwean names you will agree this is not a valid argument! So we agreed if it was a boy we would see what he looked like and decide. Turns out he's getting whiter by the day so we needn't have worried.

When my obstetrician lifted Milo out of me, she held him up and asked Clarence if he could see what it was. When Clarence saw that it was a boy I could tell by the look on his face, because everyone in the theatre was asking what we would call the baby and knew we hadn't agreed on a boy name. He turned to me and smiled and told me Pudding was a boy. I said immediately "what are we going to call him??!"...

Once I had had a decent look at him I was thinking he definitely looked like a Milo but didn't want to say that to Clarence and have him agree in the emotion of the moment, then regret it later. However, soon after we had returned to the ward Clarence looked at me and said "he looks like a Milo". We sat on it for a few hours then agreed and sent out the announcement text. If we called him Milo we had already agreed on Alexander as a middle name. So there you have it.

Milo means soldier.

Alexander means defender of men.

Milo also has about 73 nicknames already and still regularly gets called Pudding, Pud and Puddy.