Honey is a Bunny

This is Honey.

Eleanor is boycotting nicknames lately. Grant and I call our kids all kinds of nicknames and pet names, and Eleanor is really throwing off our groove with this one. When we call her Honey, she protests, "I'm not Honey. Honey is a bunny." My mother has three bunnies at her house. One is named Honey because it looks like someone drizzled honey down her back. Honey is one of the friendliest of my mother's bunnies. As their friendship has grown, Eleanor has noticed that apparently, we call her a bunny name pretty often.

Since she started telling us not to call her Honey, the protests have grown. We can't call her Sweetie or Sweetheart because "Sweetheart is a person." You know how tempting it is to answer "What-y?" after you've been hearing a long, drawn out "Mommy," or "Daddy," for a while? Well, she responds to that with, "Don't say what-y. What-y's a person!" She can get quite indignant about that one, probably because it never seems to sink in with us. She catches us on it so often.

She gets even more outraged when we commit one of these offenses when she's hurt or already angry. This is so hard because we're so used to calling her pet names. I guess we'll just have to bite our tongues for a while until this phase passes. For now, Honey is a bunny.