How in the world do you pick grandparent names? I never thought about it until I was pregnant. It actually ended up being a lot easier than I thought, although my parents have the weirdest grandparent names I’ve ever heard. Here’s how they all got their names.

When I was first pregnant with Mac, my sister and I had an entire conversation about what our parents would be called as grandparents. See, my in-laws were easy. They flat-out told us they would be called Grandma and Grandpa. Honestly, that was a little weird for me because all of my grandparents had specific nicknames. There was Mama and Papa and Nana and Gumpa. But that was fine with me. Compared to my crazy family, plain ol’ Grandma and Grandpa seemed to fit for them.

At least they told me what they wanted to be called. My parents did this thing where they want me to make a decision for something that is more about them than me. I feel like my mom did specify that she didn’t want to be Grandma because she is still fairly young. That was my only parameter to go by.

So one day, my sister and I sat down and looked up “List of Grandparent Names” and just started going through the lists, laughing at some of the funnier ones. Finally, we settled on the most ridiculous ones we could find. We called them giggling and telling them we found their new grandparent names.

It continued to be a joke throughout the rest of pregnancy, but you know what? As soon as Mac was born, we continued on with the names because we had already been calling them by those names.

And now, almost 3 years later, Mac still calls them Chief and Zippy. Well, actually she calls my dad Chiefy, but it is close enough.

Do the grandparents in your life go by weird nicknames? How did they come about?