This pandemic newborn has 6 names, but you can call her CDC

GREENBANK, Whidbey Island — Her name is Charlotte Daphne-Celeste Buzard Simmons-Otness.

You can call her CDC for short.

What’s up with that?

Those are the first three initials of this Whidbey Island baby girl with six names. She came into the pandemic world at 12:24 a.m. on Aug. 19 at Providence Pavilion for Women and Children in Everett, weighing 6 pounds, 14 ounces.

The last three names are from her mom, Oriana Simmons-Otness, and dad, Mark Buzard.

It could have been CDC SOB had they put her mom’s last names first, which is why they didn’t.

The CDC was happenstance. The parents kicked around favorite names long before she was born. Charlotte was always the standout.

“Daphne is a beautiful fragrant winter bloom,” said Simmons-Otness, 37, a Freeland Payless Food Store checker with a horticulture background. “She’s also the pretty girl on ‘Scooby-Doo.’”

As for Celeste: “I liked the heavenly connotation without being overly hippie-dippy. No rainbow moonbeams,” she said.

Back in the day, Buzard’s grandfather was in a jazz trio and played a celesta, a piano instrument that’s like a keyed glockenspiel.

“Weird cosmic stuff abounds,” said Buzard, 38, an electrician and a musician who plays in the Whidbey band Baby Island.

The couple put Charlotte Daphne-Celeste together and liked the way it sounded.

“And then the initials were CDC,” Simmons-Otness said. “And she was coming to us during this big pandemic. I felt like it was her idea. That it was her joke. I just laughed so hard.”

In this household, a laugh is the test of a good name, even for chickens. They have 20 strutting around their 10-acre Greenbank property, the likes of which have included “Ketchup” and “Mustard.”

Simmons-Otness knows about having multiple names. She has six: Oriana Rose Crystal Anemone Simmons-Otness.

Her initials are an intentional acronym for ORCAS.

“Growing up with a long name was really not a hardship for me,” she said. “It was more like I was the John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt of the playground.”

Her name has staying power.

“More than 20 years later classmates will come up to me out of nowhere that I have not seen and say, ‘Oriana Rose Crystal Anemone Simmons-Otness,’” she said. “A lot of my friends will just call me ‘O.’”

The only burden: “I have asked for many second forms trying to fit them all in.”

Buzard’s full name: Mark Townsend Buzard.

Buzard contacted the South Whidbey Record, a sibling paper of The Daily Herald, to buy a birth announcement for his daughter. With a name like that, the paper said it could run for free. The new dad was so focused on crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s that he mixed up the math.

“I accidentally put 16 pounds, 14 ounces,” he said. “They called and said, ‘I want to make sure she is really 16 pounds and 14 ounces.’”

The couple have been together for over 10 years.

They met when Simmons-Otness stopped at Buzard’s family’s Greenbank store after working in the rain at Meerkerk Rhododendron Gardens. She was fetching a six-pack for an Easter Sunday beer hunt.

“I walk in wearing triple insulated Carhartt onesies, a pretty shade of baby poop brown, the color of the diapers we are changing now,” she said. “I walk in the grocery store and there is the most handsome man I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m drenched and covered in molten mud. Great. Now here he is.”

Buzard was closing early. She was the last customer of the day.

“Then she comes in,” he said. “And the rest is history.”

Andrea Brown: abrown@heraldnet.com; 425-339-3443. Twitter @reporterbrown.

People with seriously long names

• Actor Kiefer William Frederick Dempsey George Rufus Sutherland (star of “24” and also known as Donald Sutherland’s son).

• Retired NBA all-star Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean-Jacques Wamutombo.

• Artist Pablo Picasso was baptized Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, a series of names honoring various saints and relatives.