What's In a Name?

An old post finding new life...one I wrote ages ago but never posted.

When Ben and I found out we were having a baby we pretty quickly decided we wanted a girl. This was a reversal for me, I'd always said that if I had kids I wanted boys, only boys. They just seemed easier (knowing what kind of a kid/teenager I was). I think we fixated on having a girl early just because the name came to us so quickly. I was attached to Flora which was my paternal grandmother's name and a name I find to be incredibly sweet. Ben didn't love it so it got assigned as a middle name.

From there we decided to make lists of boys and girls names we liked with each of us having the power to veto any name the other put on the list. We actually had quite a few girl names that we both liked but when Clementine went on the list, we knew that was the one. So very quickly we had named our daughter to be: Clementine Flora Thompson.

Then we found out we were having boy. Crap. (I say crap but what I really mean is: Yay! It's a boy!) For real, once we knew it was a boy we of course realized we wanted a boy all along.

Back to the drawing board... Our criteria for names turned out to be pretty limiting. For a first name the following needed to apply: a name based in nature, no bile names or religious names. (So I say "bile" but what I meant was "bible" but on the read through bile cracked me up so I'm leaving it. I think it's fitting since the thought of the bible causes bile. For me anyway. Some people love the bible. I'm not one of them.) That criteria ruled out a lot of names.

We leaned toward Forrest for a while and then one morning randomly looking at baby name websites online we came across Makai. It was the first name we both instantly liked.
In Hawaiian, Makai means "towards the ocean". It's used as a direction, as opposed to north or south they say either towards the ocean or towards the mountain. So it's like naming our kid North or East but whatever. We liked it. For short we'd call him Kai. Kai has a lot of meanings in different cultures all of which we loved. To name a few:
Hawaiian - Ocean or Sea
Scandinavian/Greek - keeper of the earth (kind of a big responsiblity for a little man)
Japanese - Ocean or paddle (Ben and his dad take a paddling trip in Canada every year with Kai to join them eventually)
Navajo - willow tree
German - safe harbor
Burmese - strong or unbreakable

At least those are the definitions the interweb gave us. And the interweb is never wrong.

Makai it was. Once that was decided a middle name was even harder. Joking around one day one of us, I'm not sure if it was Ben or me, suggested Barack. We laughed about it but it kind of stuck. He became Makai Barack as a joke for a while and then we started to consider it more seriously. We liked that it sound strong and we like Barack Obama. Like a lot. We kind of love him. I'm pretty sure Ben has a man crush on him. I certainly have a crush on him. He's super duper handsome.

Really we both find him to be ridiculously inspiring and have you seen his wife? That chic is hot and cool and strong. Anywho - he's someone we'd be proud to be named after.


The final decision was made this week with the arrival of a box from Amazon.com. My long awaited, pre-ordered copy of "Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to my Daughters" by Barack Obama. It took will power but I waited until Ben got home to crack the cover and standing at the kitchen counter we read the first page and fell in love with a childrens book. As avid readers and lovers of stories we were moved by this charming book that portrayed not only the diversity of our country but also the clear love this man has for his daughters.

So last night we decided to name our son after the 44th President of the United States, a US Senator, Nobel Peace Prize winner, best-selling author and loving father.

Makai Barack Thompson will be our sons name.

And we figure that when Makai hits his rebellious stage as we're sure he will. If, as the son of two liberal parents he decides to rebel by being a Republican we can say to him, "Be a Republican all you want, but your middle name is still Barack."

Big Successes and Small Fails

Success - Kai slept through the night. In his crib. In his own room.

Fail - Arrived at work and noticed that I have on a black bra with white polka dots (sorry to over share and there's more to come, if you don't want to know stop reading now) and a fairly sheer orange silk shirt.

I've found parenting so far to be a series of successes and failures. Above is today's example in short. Thankfully the successes are usually big and the fails relatively small.

So the big news is that Kai slept through the night, in his crib, in his very own room. He's a fairly good sleeper overall but the past couple of weeks we seem to be moving in reverse. He's been sleeping in a co-sleeper in our room and waking up multiple times in the night. Either Ben or I have to get up and replace his pacifier or feed/change him. This after months of sleeping 9 hours a night. We figured we'd try moving him to his own room just to see how it went. It's a bit quieter and cooler over there so maybe it would work. We followed our normal nighttime routine; diaper change, pajamas, music time, story time, bottle, bed. We let him cry for about 10 minutes (which felt like 3 torturous hours to me) before Ben went in and soothed him and replaced his pacifier. He passed right out at that point. At 7:15 this morning he was still soundly asleep without waking up once in the night.
Success!
--To give credit where it's due this success was largely Ben's. Left to me Kai would probably sleep in our room until he was 8.

High on our success but still exhausted, I didn't get to bed until 1 AM (damn you angry birds!)so basically got dressed for work in a haze. I arrived at work, got of my car and got the first good look at myself. My black bra with white polka dots clearly showing through my shirt. The shirt of course being bright orange in order to draw the most possible attention. Clearly I was half asleep, barely looked at myself in the mirror and need better lighting in my closet. Instead there will be a mid-day run to Kohl's for a cami. In the meantime I've got my cardigan buttoned which serves the dual purposes of hiding the tacky black bra and accentuating my saggy boobs and muffin top (aka post pregnancy body). I've also discovered those fancy Victoria's Secret bras are just not getting the job done anymore. Time for a big girl bra, not the made for super models with perky boobs bras. And don't even get me started on the wayward eyebrow hair I discovered in the visor mirror this morning (is it just me or does the visor mirror magnify them?) Fail!

And speaking of fails...this blog. It's super outdated. I have about a dozen posts in draft form. The goal is to have a couple posted this week with Makai pictures and updates.

The picture above has absolutely nothing to do with this post but it's a fairly recent one of Makai. Drool and all.