The Name Game

Hello everyone, this is Pete!

I am making my blogging debut to let you all know that we have decided on a name! As my lovely wife has written, I have had a heck of a time deciding what to call our child... There is so much responsibility involved! This is one of the few things that will affect your child for the REST OF THEIR LIFE!

So, to give you a little history, I will take you on a journey of The Name Game over the past 7 months...

In the first few months, Marie was all about deciding a name for our child. She bought the "1 trillion baby names" book which I immediately hid away. I went along non-committal-like, but with enough interest to not get her mad at me. A few names were tossed about, but we were still kind of in shock about getting pregnant in the first place, so nothing was really talked about with any seriousness.

Sometime in August, Marie REALLY starts to get serious about naming our child, but I told her that I need to find out the gender before I even consider a name, because that immediately eliminates half of the choices! I was not about to waste my time thinking about a name that wasn't even going to work. So August 25th rolls around and we find out that it is a boy. The ironic thing is that by this time we had already mutually agreed on an acceptable girl name, so it was back to the drawing board for a boy's name.

I looked over the book and wrote a few names down and immediately knocked a few off the list. However, I was really struggling with this name thing! We determined that if we used one of our father's names we would have to use both, and could not just use one or the other, which would essentially mean that he would have two middle names (like me)!

Right before the sonogram that would determine his gender, we had some friends visiting and we were kidding around after watching a Carl Weathers movie and I said that if we had a boy, we would call him Tyrone "Action Jackson" Hackman. I liked it, and it had a nice ring to it. Funny enough, the Action Jackson moniker stuck and we started calling him AJ instead of Pinhead.

So we kind of liked it and decided that we would try names starting with A like Andrew or Alexander, with either Joseph Douglas or Pierce as the middle names. Joseph William is Marie's father's name, and Charles Douglas was my father's name. Pierce is actually a form of the name Peter. We had tried a few combinations, but nothing really sounded right.

We tried out Alex for a while and it just didn't fit. We tried out Andrew for a day and it worked better, but it still wasn't right. I was starting to get a little frustrated and felt like I was now starting back at square one!

Then, earlier this week, after a visit by some friends who have a 3 week old son named Charlie, it just kind of hit me... Despite the odd nicknames for Charles (as mentioned in a previous entry by Marie) I kind of liked the name! I mentioned this to Marie and she told me that oddly enough, she was kind of liking the name as well! She immediately took that as a sign that our son was going to be named Charles and that it was my choice for the middle name... Either Joseph or William. I thought it over for a bit and decided that I really did like the name!

So after much thought and discussion, we have decided that he will be named Charles Joseph after our both of our fathers... However, if you want to call him Charlie, Tyrone, Chuck, CJ, Action Jackson, Chip, Chaz, or even Bubba, that is fine with me too. Although, I have to say that Charles is not technically his name until we put it on the birth certificate! I may decide to change my mind, but I doubt it... It has been hard enough getting this far! So, I hereby declare that the Name Game is officially over! Yay!