Mama-Come-Lately

Yesterday my mom heard me call the baby “mamoush,” and asked what it meant. It’s a fair question; my husband is from India, and as you can see from the notes above, the baby does have a slew of non-English nicknames that do mean something.

Not this one, though. Here’s my best recollection of how it came about: I started calling him boo-boo. No idea why, and this was before I was aware of that awful show about the baby girl beauty queen. From there, I progressed to moo-moo. Then baboo, which is still in the rotation, and babushka, which is Russian and Polish for grandma. Which makes no sense for a baby but is fun to say, so I shortened it to baboush. And from there we hopped over to mamoush, which is sticking.

For the moment, anyway.