Why the Pickle name?

We are calling the baby a pickle for a lot of reasons:
we love pickles (duh!),
we're nick-namers, we're reading SIX baby books that all use food to discuss fetal body size (like it would completely tank the sales of a baby book to say "at week 26 your fetus is the size of a human skull") and none of them use pickles,
we've noticed that pickles and pregnant women are alarmingly ubiquitous (go ahead, try googling it),
and you know, je ne sias quois. 

But the most important reasons are that we've decided to be surprised about the sex of the child and because it was a Herculean task finding "crave-satisfying" Dill pickles in Beijing.
It's a no-brainer as far as the former is concerned.  Pickles are gender neutral even though they can be discussed in euphemistic terms that range anywhere from humorous to distasteful.  What else would you say can satisfy that requirement? Booger... that reads like "little boy."  Angel?  Unless Kasha is secretly set to birth a Latino, Angel is synonymous with "little girl." I could've been satisfied with "Squirt" as it smacks of cutes-y-ness and gives a long-overdue kudos to the tasty beverage whose dynamic flavors are (somehow) superior even to its Fay-Go Pop counterpart.  Nonetheless, Pickle it is.  Kasha is fond of applying the term to the young members of our human race, and, at times, small cats. 

As for the latter, we'd really never given much thought to pickles in Beijing before the cravings hit.  Sure, we had tried some and been shocked at how far gone a pickle can be screwed up.  We've all seen 'em roll off your paper plate at a picnic and all you have to do is splash some beer on them till most of the dirt is off.  Not the Pickles available in Beijing, boy.  Email me if you'd like details on every gross thing I've even eaten... I'm all about sharing. But as for my purposes here today, suffice it to say that the pickles we had found in China left a great deal to be desired.

Until, a month into the search, I found the one place in Beijing (City Shop, near Nurenjie, downstairs from Starbucks) that had tasty dills.  Kosher Dills, but who's keeping track?  After a search of that length, dill was the operative word and everything else was filler.  Imagine crawling through the desert for a week, sand stuck fast in the deep cracks of your parched tongue.  Along comes a guy with a bottle of Holy water.  You know, we just wanted tasty Dills. And we got Vlasic Dill Pickles, as a matter of fact.  And what's on the Vlasic Pickle jar?  None other that the Vlasic Stork, toking a pickle-stogie!  Ahhhhh! The Stork! And...There you have it, Pickle Smith.