Liam (noun).

When I was pregnant Brad and I swore up and down we wouldn't use silly baby talk at home. We wanted to treat our new addition like a real member of the family, not like a pet! But, as I now know, many of the lofty plans that you make when you're pregnant (cloth diapering? breastfeeding for 18 months? making my own baby food?) become...well...just that. Lofty plans.

We've actually been pretty good about avoiding the baby talk, per se. But without realizing it, we've managed to develop our own little vocabulary for all things Liam. So, without further ado, and a bit of embarrassment, I present to you our dictionary.

Dipe (n): Diaper. I somehow started calling diapers "dipes" right from the beginning, probably because I was so sleep-deprived I couldn't force out the whole word. It caught on fast, and now we don't change diapers -- we "change dipes."

Fuss (n): OK, we didn't invent this word, but we invented the way we use it -- as a noun. When Liam wakes up in the middle of the night, which is unfortunately way too often, we call it "a fuss." As in, "he had a three o'clock fuss last night." or "I'll handle his first fuss." Lately we've been dropping the word fuss and referring to his wakeups like business meetings: "his three o'clock." Our bleary-eyed morning conversation often goes like this. "How many fusses did he have last night?" "He had an eleven o'clock, a one o'clock and a four o'clock. That last fuss was his wakeup fuss."

Butt-pat fuss (n): Sometimes, a fuss only requires a few minutes of patting Liam on the butt to get him to go back to sleep. It also works to rub his back or jiggle his mattress. In context: "I didn't need to feed him during his 3 o'clock. It was only a butt-pat fuss."

Snerf (n): Please withhold your judgement. I realize a kid as cute as ours deserves a sweet nickname like peanut, sweetie-pie, sweet pea, etc. Nope...instead we call him Snerf. Often. To the point where he may think this is actually his name. It all started when he had his first of many daycare-acquired colds, and instead of "the sniffles" he had "the snerfles." (My fault.) Somehow, that evolved into a nickname that Brad and I both latched onto. There are variations like Snerfie, Snerfus, and Snerf-a-gus, but mostly we just use plain old Snerf.

I'm sure I'm missing a few here (Brad?) but those are the ones that immediately come to mind. What about all of you with little kids, or even pets? I KNOW you guys have your own dictionaries. Come on...'fess up!