Toads-in-the-Hole

Today's a banner day for Henry - He's two months old!

We've moved on from the sleeping, mewing newborn phase and onto bigger and better things with lots of funny smiles, sweet cooing, and loads of eye contact.

In celebration of Henry's achievements, I thought that we'd take a moment and tell the provenance of his name.

So, there we were, discharging from the hospital after just a 24-hour overnight stay following our delivery and still we'd not settled on a name for our little guy. We'd had our list of Brave Names and Name Names in hand, but just hadn't had a moment's peace to sit down a put pen to paper between the vital sign checks, the newborn examinations, the whirlpool tubs, the comforting of Adelaide, the coordinating of details, and the celebration of our health and success. But in order to sneak home early we were required to complete the baby's birth certificate, and the first question on the birth certificate is What Is Baby's Name?

Our hospital room was a scene of chaos and activity. Joel had brought chinese take-out for us and the room was filled with the delicious, decadent smells of MSG and fried crab rangoon. In between bites of her supper, Adelaide, like a maniacal fountain spraying rice, bounced around the room, jumping from couch to bed to chair and back again in her excitement. A line of nurses - my co-workers - nearing shift change at seven o' clock, stopped by to admire the baby and congratulate us. Simultaneously, Marmee, Joel, and I were all on our respective cell phones with various well-wishers all the while trying to eat and pack up our stuff. With the lights on and the decibels increasing, the baby magically slept.

And the blank for the baby's name on the birth certificate stared.

"Well, what should we name him?" I asked Joel.

After tossing a few names (e.g., Samuel, Edward, Abraham) up in the air and immediately shooting them back down again, we kept coming back to our favorites: Henry (my favorite) and Casper (Joel's favorite).

I'd recently read in a baby naming book that parents should give their babies a name that they would like to have themselves. Henry has always been a baby name at the top of my list. It's a tried and true name that has an active place in history and at the same time is short, sweet, and fun to say in French. I also like the letter H. It's symmetrical. I like symmetry. And all the nicknames! Harry, Hal (or Hotspur, if we're going to be truly pretentious), Hank, Enrique, Henri, and on and on ...

Casper is a cool name that Joel and I unearthed while we were hunting for baby names when Adelaide was still in utero. Hand-me-downs at One Day old, right? Forget the friendly ghost for just a minute, and say Casper out loud ... Isn't it cool? Hard consonants and that neat "zeh" sound sandwiched between the C and the P make it a brilliant name to shout or say in a stage whisper. In the 8th century A.D., the Roman Catholic church gave names to the then-tofore unnamed Magi who visited and showered the infant Jesus with gold, frankincense and myrrh: Balthasar, Melchior, and Caspar. That always seemed like kind of a cool namesake to me, a humbled and honored king celebrating the birth of a tiny baby born in poverty, but destined for greatness. And Joel thought that Cap would be a great nickname.

So, in pen, I wrote Henry Casper on the blank birth certificate and we congratulated ourselves on a job well done.