Names and the Pets Who Have Them

Where did your name come from?

There have been a lot of name prompts over the last few months. My name is Sarah. It means “princess” in Hebrew but I wasn’t named after the biblical Sarah. I was named after a cute little blonde girl in the post office that my mom saw when she was pregnant with me. There. Now that we got that out of the way, here’s my twist on the question… “Where did the name for your pets come from?” As Elyse Myers says at the beginning of her videos, “Great question, I’d love to tell you.”

We’ll start with my dearly departed ginger boy Joey.

When I got him as a kitten, he was all orange except for a patch of black fur on his back paw. It looked like a smudge of dirt. So my thought process was, he looks dirty. Dirty-dirt-Joe Dirt-Joey. So he was named after a David Spade character.

Then we got Faye. Whose full name is FayeMadiTu’, so named because just before we got her, we had a kitten named Madi that I eventually gave away. My husband kept calling Faye, Madi. He’d get flustered and ended up running the names together into one. So FayeMadi2, like Madi #2, except the 2 is French or something at the end rather than the number. But she’s Faye at heart.

She’s Faye because when I brought her home on the first day, she was clinging to the side of the carrier and wailing with all her kitten might. She was oh so dramatic. So I thought of the actress who gave the most dramatic performance ever. Can you guess? Faye Dunaway! You know the, “No wire hangers!” lady from the movie “Mommie Dearest”. That’s Faye. She remains just as vocal and dramatic at almost 19 as she was at 9 weeks.

She and Joey were snuggle buddies by the way. Joey didn’t have a choice. Faye made him her best friend whether he liked it or not.

I think that’s why she snuggles with me so much. Joey died and then we got this one…

That’s Nugget. My first touch-me-not cat. She hates being touched. Which is part of why she’s named Nugget. Her predecessor Joey hated the vet. I brought him one time and I was apologizing for his rudeness and the vet compared him to Faye, who purrs at the vet and is every vet tech’s dream. The doctor said, Faye is a regular chicken nugget. And Joey is just a spicy chicken nugget. So when Nugget showed her spicy side when we got her, I thought back to what the vet said and named this little gremlin, Nugget.

To be fair, she wasn’t always like that. Here’s evidence that she was actually nice at one point:

Now we get to our dogs.

First, we got Rocky:

Rocky was 3 when we rescued him. He didn’t have a name at the shelter. But we picked the name Rocky because before we could take him home, he had to be treated for some wounds that he had. We don’t know exactly what happened to him but it was obvious he had been in a fight or had been attacked by another animal. So since he was a fighter, we went with Rocky. He was the sweetest boy that ever was. Completely deaf, but full of love. I think I wrote a whole post about him last year.

Rocky left us too soon. He had a seizure disorder that medication stopped being able to control. We didn’t have him long and it broke our hearts when he died.

Millie was our rainbow dog, so to speak.

We didn’t pick her name. It was what they gave her at the shelter and since she wasn’t deaf like Rocky, we didn’t change it so she wouldn’t be confused.

Finally, we got Ethan. That’s also the name they gave him at the shelter. We didn’t change it because when we brought him home, Millie started fan girling all over him. And through all that, he was calm, cool, and collected. So we saw him as like, the new boy at school that all the girls swoon over. The name Ethan is a cool kid’s name. He probably wears polo shirts with the collar popped up.

Recently, it was brought to my attention, by my brother-in-law, that I missed a golden opportunity with Ethan. He wanted to know why I have two dogs, one of them named Millie and the other one NOT named Vanilli. I was ashamed of myself. Blame it on the rain or just my poor memory. I didn’t even make that connection. I must not be as much of an 80s/90s kid as I thought.

Just look at this duo!

Ethan even has the brown spot over his eye as if he has his hair parted and flipped to that side!

I feel like nobody in my family is ever going to call him Ethan again and if they do, it’ll be Ethan Vanilli or vice versa.

So there you have it. Most of the pets I’ve had as an adult. The names are probably creative because the last pet I had was my childhood cat, Kitty. Nothing at all creative about that.