What's in a name?

...more than you would think. Buster hasn't made it to his permanent home yet and he has already gone through a name change. From Milhaven Buster Benjamin Macnab to Milhaven Buster Benjamin Mcnab. It seems the AKS has limits on the number of characters in a dog's name (30) and Milhaven Buster Benjamin Macnab comes in at 1 over the limit at 31 characters. So what to do? what to do? We thought about dropping his kennel name Milhaven, but that thought lasted about three seconds. Then we thought about shortening his first name to Bustr (too cute). Maybe, we thought, we should use Milhaven Buster B Macnab? But then, what about all those questions about what the B stood for.

It turns out we had the solution all along. When Martie first wrote us about the 'cute boy puppy' she wrote that the sire's name was Miletree Mcnab. At first our biggest question was whether the 'n' should be capitalized, as in McNab. Well Pat Landers (Miletree Macnab's owner), set us straight that it was lower case. Funny thing is that the AKC capitalizes all letters in dog's name on their registration certificate anyway.

Hmmm. EUREKA! If we use the original spelling Martie gave us of Mcnab, we would come in exactly with 30 characters. We also figured that we could still honor the sire by naming him Mcnab, just with a different spelling (sort of like a Jr., or the II).

It even turns out that we first registered Buster's web site initially using the Mcnab spelling in error.

So, after much deliberation, Milhaven Buster Benjamin Mcnab, it will be.

To make things easier, we also registered www.busterbenjaminmacnab.com and www.busterbenjamin.com just to play it safe and to make his web site easier to find. They all lead to the same place.

So know you know more than you ever wanted to know about how our dog's name came to be.