Castrovenes

As I was driving to work today, I realized that with all of our planning and preparing for the baby, we had forgotten to do one of the most important things.  We didn't assign the baby a racing nickname!  It's a tradition that my wife and I started, and we have to pass it on to the next generation.

Early on in our marriage, after a particularly bad shorts-peeing episode in the car, I was commenting on the speed and recklessness of my mother-in-law's driving.  She was flying down narrow roads with cars parked on both sides and barely a paper's breadth of space between our car mirrors and theirs.  I had strapped myself into the backseat with every seat belt I could find and was holding onto the OS bar like my life depended on it.  My wife mentioned later that she and her brother used to call her mother "Hakkinen" after Mika Hakkinen, the Finnish Formula One race car driver.

It didn't take long for me to realize that my wife had inherited her mother's love for speed and recklessness as she whipped her car through the throngs of big-city traffic.  When I wasn't screaming like a little girl, or asking her to slow down, I started to call her "Andretti" after Mario Andretti, the Italian Formula One race car driver.  Instead of making her feel bad about scaring the urine out of me, she relished the name like a badge of honor.

A year ago when I got my Nissan Maxima and finally had a car with power (the Toyota Corolla I had before being a laughable attempt at power), I started to drive with a little more speed and aggressiveness as well.  It's like a right of passage or something, because the moment that you embrace this, you have to be dubbed with a racing name.  Mine is "Toretto" after Dominic Toretto, the fictional protagonist of The Fast and the Furious franchise.

And while I know that our baby is far from driving yet, I still feel like it needs a racing nickname.  So, I'm going to call it "Castrovenes" after Helio Castrovenes, the Brazilian Indy race car driver.  Now, all the baby has to do is live up to the name and make us proud!