A Japanese couple who won a free honeymoon courtesy of the German airline Lufthansa were so grateful for their wonderful trip to Germany and their romantic stay in the Black Forest that when their son was born nine months later, they named him ‘Lufthansa’.
ARTHUR Pepper had his daughter christened in 1883, with the name Anna Bertha Cecilia Diana Emily Fanny Gertrude Hypatia Inez Jane Kate Louisa Maud Nora Ophelia Quince Rebecca Sarah Teresa Ulysses Venus Winifred Xenophon Yetty Zeus Pepper – one name for every letter of the alphabet.
MR and Mrs James Williams felt that their own names were pretty uninspired, so when their daughter was born on 12 September 1984 in Beaumont, Texas, they named her: Roshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenkkoyaanfsquatsiuty.
ON 8 November 1847, Dr James Young Simpson, professor of midwifery at Edinburgh University, first used chloroform as an anaesthetic in the delivery of the wife of a fellow surgeon. She was so delighted with the painless delivery that she named her daughter Anaesthesia.
IN 1971 Grace Slick officially named her daughter ‘god’. When she was asked why she registered the name with a small g, she replied, ‘Because we’ve got to be humble about this.’
Bottoms Up
IN the UK, 2,191,781 pounds of paper are used in non-recyclable disposable nappies every year. 48,835,616 disposable nappies are thrown away.
JAPANESE mothers change their babies’ nappies an average of fourteen times a day – twice as much as European and American mothers.
SAINSBURY’S once promised a year’s supply of free nappies for pregnant mums whose waters break in one of their stores.
SOME professions pose problems that we lesser mortals thankfully never have to worry about. Take, for instance, nappy manufacturers. How do they test their products? It seems that babies can be unreliable when it comes to delivering waste on time, so scientists at the Kimberley Clark Corporation have come up with synthetic faeces. Apparently testers, reluctant to use the real thing, had tried mashed potatoes, peanut butter, and even tinned pumpkin pie mix – but none of them was chemically accurate enough.
Delighted testers can now use a compound which comes in a dry mix to which water is added for the desired consistency. It can be any colour, but they usually use brown. At the request of the testers, it is odourless. For anyone interested in the recipe, the US patent number is 5,356,626.
A MERICAN parents can make potty training fun by purchasing an audio book entitled ‘I’m on the Potty’. Set to familiar nursery rhyme tunes, they can sing along with ‘Diapers Falling on the Ground’ (Instead of ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’), and ‘I’m on the Potty’. Presumably, ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’ is not included, although we thought we might suggest ‘Spending Pennies From Heaven’ for the next edition.
Quotable Quotes
‘The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.’ Clarence Darrow
‘An ugly baby is a very nasty object, and the prettiest is frightful when undressed.’ Queen Victoria
‘The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.’ Duke of Windsor
Royal Babies – and Their Parents
PRINCE Hartmann of Liechtenstein, 1613–86, had twenty-four children – more than any other royal parent. Duke Roberto of Parma, 1848–1907, also had twenty-four children – but by two different wives.
ANAESTHESIA was originally opposed by churchmen as a method to ease the pain of childbirth. They claimed that in the Bible, Eve was told, ‘In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children’ as a punishment for eating the forbidden fruit, and that it was going against God’s will to ensure painless childbirth. However, when Queen Victoria benefited from its effects during the birth of her seventh child in 1853, churchmen suddenly decided that maybe it was not a sin after all. Thereafter, it was known as ‘anaesthesia à la Reine’.
MARIE Antoinette was a trend-setter in the eighteenth century, and all the fashionable ladies at court would study and copy everything she wore. When she became pregnant, the ladies followed her trend – not by conceiving, but by inserting ever larger cushions under their clothes as the queen’s pregnancy progressed. Not surprisingly, as soon as Marie Antoinette gave birth to the Dauphin, the padded stomach became last season’s look!
WHEN British royal babies are christened, holy water from the River Jordan is specially flown in. The font is brought in from the Jewel House of the Tower of London for the occasion, and the cream Honiton lace christening gown bears the needlework of the young Edward VII, who was reputed to have taken four hours to fashion each square inch of the garment’s wild rose pattern.
Superstitions
UP until the late Victorian period, people believed that a suckling baby absorbed the moral character of the woman nursing. So, if a mother could not breast-feed her own child, the wet nurse was subject to a rigorous cross-examination on her morality. If the parents suspected she was a drunkard, or a half-wit, they believed the child would be one too.
THE Chinook Indian tribe considered a flat skull to be a sign of beauty – so they strapped babies head to toe between boards until the end of their first year.
THE significance of storks in connection with babies seems to emanate from beliefs spanning many centuries and cultures. In Roman mythology, the stork was sacred to Venus, the goddess of love, so the ancients considered it a sign of good luck if storks nested near their home. The stork has long been considered a good luck omen in Norse, German and Dutch folklore.
IN nineteenth-century Wales, the bone from a shoulder of mutton was used to predict the sex of an unborn child. After being charred in a fire, the bone was hung over the door of the house. It was believed that the child would be the same sex as the next person to come through the door.
IN Germany it was once believed that a wife who carried one of her husband’s socks would never give birth prematurely.
A baby born into the Akha tribe of Thailand cannot be touched until it has cried three times.
THE Asmat people of New Guinea believe that, in order to have a baby, a woman must be impregnated by the spirit of an ancestor and the spirit is always of the same sex as the new-born child.
IN some African tribes, the men will take to their beds for the entire duration of their wife’s pregnancy. The women continue to work as usual until a few hours before giving birth. They believe that men are cleverer as well as physically stronger than women and are therefore better able to defend unborn children against malign and evil spirits.
THE Punan tribe of Borneo believe that women are born without a soul, and do not acquire one until they marry. There are certain advantages to this – as she has no soul, she cannot sin, so Punan girls can have a very active sex life until they marry. There is, however, a drawback to this belief. In order to gain a soul, the Punan girl’s husband has to find