The Evolution of a name

Naming people and pets and places is an interesting process. For the farmer and me, we've always chosen names that have a special meaning to us personally. Our kids names are a combination of family names and names of personal significance. Our pets names don't follow a pattern necessarily since the kids have helped out with those. Naming the new calf has been a ongoing process and took a pretty funny turn at the end.

My daughter has decided to begin a career of showing animals in our regional fair. This year she can show a large animal and since our calf would be born at just the right time for this, we told her this calf would be hers to raise. She has been thinking of names for 9 months, like any mother-to-be does.

It started out that if it were a boy or a girl, the name would be Sweet Little Buttercup. We all wanted 'sweet' in there since our Mama cow is Sweetums and her first calf was called Bittersweet, so we wanted to continue the thread. But as time went on, she decided that if it were a boy it would be Sweet-tarts, and a girl would be Buttercup (for short). So it was settled.

We were out of town at the time of the birth of the calf. We received a text from my father-in-law that said: "Bull calf born @6pm" I have always known the sex of my children before they were born, so finding out like this was new to me. I really felt in that moment that I was so happy for a healthy baby it really didn't matter to me that deep down we all were wishing for a heifer. Our daughter saw the photo that was sent along with the text and immediately said, "His name is Sweet-tarts!" And then a few minutes later she looked at the photo again, and said "His name is Max actually." I seriously don't have a clue where this came from, and was so shocked at her last minute decision to change his name to something that not only didn't have 'sweet' in it, but was in such stark contrast to our previous choices, that I just laughed and said "OK, Max it is." We sent a text back to my FIL on the name so he could properly address the calf until we got home.

About an hour later, we got a text from my FIL: "Max is actually Maxine". We all thought this was wildly funny and when I gave our daughter the news, she absolutely loved the name and it has stuck.

Introducing Sweet Maxine...I added the Sweet!