{"id":1161,"date":"2010-09-30T23:13:53","date_gmt":"2010-10-01T04:13:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/2010\/09\/30\/thoughts-on-baby-names\/"},"modified":"2010-09-30T23:13:53","modified_gmt":"2010-10-01T04:13:53","slug":"thoughts-on-baby-names","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/2010\/09\/30\/thoughts-on-baby-names\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on Baby Names"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Thanks for participating with us in the latest edition of &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/2010\/09\/24\/name-for-baby-bolen\/\">Name That Baby!<\/a>&#8220;&#160; We enjoyed your responses.&#160; The night we posted the survey was the night we &#8220;decided&#8221; on a name.&#160; I put that in quotation marks because nothing is final until the ink is dry on the birth certificate.&#160; But we think we finally know.<\/p>\n<p>This isn&#8217;t the first time we &#8216;ve needed the right name for a baby boy.&#160; Luke was an easy name for us, as we had had it in mind for some years.&#160; But the names after that were not as easy (excluding our first daughter, who also had a name from very early in our marriage).<\/p>\n<p>Because our first son is named Luke and our second son is Mark, some people think we named our kids after two of the writers of Gospels.&#160; We did not.&#160; We like the name Luke, and we like the name Mark.&#160; It&#8217;s true that we also like books by the same names, so we don&#8217;t deny the influence of good associations (and thus, we didn&#8217;t name any of our boys &#8220;Judas&#8221;).&#160; People who know that the first movie I <strike>went to<\/strike> slept through in a theater was <em>Star Wars<\/em> may think our oldest got his name from one of the characters.&#160; But that&#8217;s not the case either, though our son does sometimes call himself &#8220;Skywalker.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s only natural that people who know the names of the Gospels will joke that our next kid will be Matthew (or John).&#160; We understand their amusement, but can&#8217;t say that we share it.&#160; Our reply, usually unspoken, is that our third son was named Timothy.<\/p>\n<p>We do like the names Matthew and John (one more than the other), but we &#8216;ve eliminated them from consideration because those who knew all of our kids (which will be fewer as the days go by) would have the wrong idea.&#160; It strikes me as well as a bit too &#8220;cutesy,&#8221; even if I know there was no such intention.<\/p>\n<p>As for your suggestions\/predictions, the one that was the most humorous was Eugene Jehu.&#160; For those who don&#8217;t know, Eugene is the name of a OT scholar who wrote a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0801031990\/713713713-20\">very important book<\/a> on the history of Israel.&#160; Jehu is the subject of my (anticipated) dissertation.<\/p>\n<p>We got lots of biblical suggestions\/predictions, including most commonly Ezekiel(!) and Isaiah.&#160; All three of the middle names we &#8216;ve given to our boys were suggested multiple times: Nathan, Josiah, and David.&#160; Todd was suggested as a first name and a middle name.&#160; So was Mahershalalhashbaz (by the same clown who proposed I&#8217;mgoin &#8216;).&#160; Other biblical names suggested were Jericho, Judah, Noah, Shiloh, and Silas.&#160; As for names of prophets, it&#8217;s easier to list the ones that weren&#8217;t suggested; no one seems to like Zephaniah or Malachi.<\/p>\n<p>Some thought that we should go with a Texas-themed name, like &#8220;Dallas Austin.&#8221;&#160; Another said she &#8216;d name her kid &#8220;Wilberforce Spurgeon.&#8221;&#160; We decided that we &#8216;ll not steal her idea.&#160; There were only two anonymous suggestions, with one suggesting &#8220;Todd&#8221; and the other offering up &#8220;Nehemiah Thunderheart.&#8221;&#160; That does remind me of one of the names I&#8217;ve teased Kelli that I would insist upon: Thor.<\/p>\n<p>As for the name we have chosen, one person suggested\/predicted our first name and several suggested\/predicted the middle.&#160; Nobody put them together.&#160; Lord willing, we will introduce you to our child here in about 10 days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thanks for participating with us in the latest edition of &#8220;Name That Baby!&#8220;&#160; We enjoyed your responses.&#160; The night we posted the survey was the night we &#8220;decided&#8221; on a name.&#160; I put that in quotation marks because nothing is final until the ink is dry on the birth certificate.&#160; But we think we finally\u2026 <span class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/2010\/09\/30\/thoughts-on-baby-names\/\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","category-polls"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1161\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}