I was about eight years old when I got her, and my maternal grandmother was my Nana. Mae Bess was blessed with an abrupt, staccato name-a problem I noticed even as a child. Today, my adult self finds her name charming. I was not a name nerd at the time, and simply gave him the name my parents would have used if any of their daughters had been a boy.Įvelina Kit’s name did not appeal to me in the ‘90s, and my sisters and I resorted to calling her Evie (EVV-ee).
Thus her middle name has long been lost to me.ĭaniel James was named by yours truly, as he was rescued from a consignment shop in an abandoned and naked state. Her name might flow just fine to the average person, but to my childhood ear it was a disastrous clash of my best friend’s first name and my sister’s first name, like mixing water and oil.īrandon Michael came with a trendy ‘90s name that I liked just fine remember, this was before Nameberry broadened my horizons.Ĭollette was my very first CPK, and I was too little to read her birth certificate myself or to care what her middle name was. My little plastic-headed family was saddled with one or two such names, though I was particularly lucky in that most of mine came with lovely name choices:Ībigail Sarah became just Abby to me. Don’t get me wrong, some of these dolls come with names as magical as the land whence they came, but many of them feature odd, rarely-heard name combos that clash stylistically and rhythmically. I do not know who is responsible for the name combos that come on Cabbage Patch Kids’ birth certificates, but I can tell you this: It is not a Nameberry. Apart from the one that I bought second-hand without his birth certificate, and another that came with a horrid name that absolutely had to be changed, I felt obligated to keep the names they had borne since their emergence from the magical cabbage patch. They were my babies in every way but one: I did not name them. I owned the special CPK baby carrier, and put my dolls to bed each night on wooden doll-sized bunk beds made my great-grandfather (yes, I did fit all seven of them onto one set of bunk beds…and they slept just fine stacked on top of one another, thank you very much). I held them, clothed them, took them for walks in little doll strollers, bought them each pairs of handmade CPK-sized underwear from a local flea market, and I was even able to give one of them baths because she was a special variety of CPK made to go in water. They were, as the legend goes, born in a magical cabbage patch presumably located in some supernatural corner of America that is birthing plastic-headed, soft-bodied babies to this very day.Īs I said, my Cabbage Patch Kids (CPKs) were my babies, and I had seven.
This American line of dolls has been going strong since the late 1970s, each one coming with a unique set of features, clothing, and best of all, birth certificates, complete with first names, middle names, and birth dates. Some of you international Berries may not know what I’m talking about, but you American Berries who were children of the ‘80s and ‘90s understand what I mean when I say that my Cabbage Patch Kids were my babies. They may not have actually walked or talked, but I loved them unconditionally in spite of these limitations. When I was a child, I had seven children…or so I believed.