What's in a name?

In an effort to find the perfect name for our little girl - and by perfect I mean unique, traditional, but slightly trendy and common, but not too common - I have experimented with drawing inspiration from the "Baby Name Inventor" on babyzone.com. Below are a few of my favorites:

Nindenda: if Sean was a bigger Super Mario fan, I think he'd be pushing for this one; all it takes is two letter changes to get Nintendo (maybe that's the male version).

Tyanannan: reminds me of an enormous flying dinosaur; not exactly the image I want associated with my daughter.

Rexatan: sounds like the prescription I'll be picking up for the next case of "bug bites" my kids come down with.

Dec: let's hope she's not more than two days late.

Garage: really?

Lynelamar: I think this may be a monkey-like animal only found in the Outback...g'day mate.

Zeseerch: maybe if I was Freud...or Sherlock Holmes...

Hanaure
Manar: these two appeared together and all I saw was "manure"...again, no.

Resicola: I have visions of German men in Lederhosen blowing into long horns on a commercial for Pepsi.

So far nothing has met the aforementioned criteria so I guess we'll keep looking.

My Favorite Session Yet

We spent a stressful Saturday morning at Flash Portraits in Burnsville Center taking pictures and then choosing the actual prints to order, but I think it was worth the effort. These pictures are my favorite of all of them that we've done there. Below are a few of both boys. If you would like to see them all online, email me and I'll tell you how.

New Names

It seems we'll be searching for two new names; one for our blog and one for the daughter we'll welcome at the end of December (okay, how many of you thought I was going to announce twins?). At our ultrasound today everything with the baby seemed to be right on track (measurements indicate she weighs 10 ounces) and she appears to be healthy. We are praising God for His wonderful gifts and divine providence.

Thank you to everyone who participated in our baby poll and congratulations to all those who guessed girl. You don't win anything. Just be happy you were right.

Oh - and we're open to suggestions on names for the blog or the baby.

How did that go?

We have a set of books at home that were mine when I was little. Over the last year or so Jack has really enjoyed them going from being able to identify the objects in the books to being able to understand some of the concepts they teach. Each book addresses a different subject: sounds, shapes, words, etc. A few nights ago we happened to be looking through the "nature book" before bed and got to the page below.

Sean explained that a butterfly starts as an egg, turns into a caterpillar, then a chrysallis and finally emerges as a butterfly.

Then we got to this page and Jack explained that the egg in the upper left corner would turn into a baby bird, then a robin, then a cardinal and finally a cat. I'll just reiterate that he can understand some of the concepts. I guess this is one we need to work on.