Who is Tuco Salamanca?

Tuco Salamanca is a crazy wild card. He’s a violent drug kingpin, and he’s terrifying. If you look up meth-dealing sociopath in the dictionary, guess whose picture you’d see? That’s right, Tuco Salamanca’s.

I have a baby boy named Tuco. Well, that’s not his real name–it’s just what we call him sometimes. I admit it’s a poor nickname choice for a baby. You can see by the two pictures to the right that it wasn’t based on physical resemblance. It happened because sleep deprivation leads to bad ideas and because AMC’s Breaking Bad is fantastic.

When we brought our son home from the hospital, we were near the end of watching season one of Breaking Bad on DVD. We were hooked and could not wait to see the next episode after each one ended. Breaking Bad became our reward for making it though the day successfully with our newborn.

When our son would go to sleep for a couple hours in the evening, we would make dinner and watch a Breaking Bad episode. We chose to do this over sleep because it made us feel better than sleeping did. For 45 minutes out of the day, we felt like our old selves. It helped take away the sting of feeling your life completely changed by the arrival of a baby.

One night, our son was asleep in his swing in the room with us as we watched an episode. When the episode was over, my husband looked over at our son peacefully sleeping and said, “Look at that little Tuco over there.” I looked at our baby and lovingly said, “Oh Tu-co! Little Tuco Salamanca!”

So yadda, yadda, yadda, we’ve been referring to our son as Tuco ever since.