The Name Game

We stayed up far too late last night in a last-ditch effort to name our kid. Allison from the hospital is going to call me at some point in time today to get the name from us, and we promised we'd have one ready. So guess which one we settled on? Grayson! Yeah, go figure. And guess which one of us finally settled on it? Josh did!

I couldn't believe it. We had about 30 names on our list and made the rule that we couldn't add any more - we had to choose from those already listed. Another rule was that either of us could nix any name we wanted to, regardless of how much the other person liked it. The final rule was that we couldn't keep a name on the list if we didn't like it just because we knew the other person liked it. So with our list and the rules in hand, we started going through name after name and crossing off the losers. I was the one that originally suggested Grayson and was pretty set on it before we even knew we were having a boy. Well, Josh didn't like that he wasn't part of the naming process, so he had protested pretty heavily against it. I accepted that the fate of 'Grayson' was improbable, and had moved on to other names, particularly Trevin and Lincoln.

Anyway, throughout the elimination process, Josh kept Grayson on the list, even after I asked him to cross it off. He knew that I liked it, and he said he liked it better than some others on the list, so I let him do what he wanted with it (even though he was breaking the third rule). We finally cut the list down to our top five - Trevin, Lincoln, Grayson, Dylan, and Mason. Josh nixed Trevin and Lincoln, and I cut Dylan. We were down to Grayson and Mason, and he looks more like a Mason than a Grayson to me, so I said, "K, let's name him Mason" but Josh was more hesitant. We both liked the alliteration of Grayson with our last name, but we thought Mason sounded more masculine. We were stuck, and I was getting very tired.

We decided to draw his name out of a bowl - the best of five draws - and Mason ended up winning. So why is his name Grayson instead? Josh made an executive decision to go with the name that sounded best, and I was finally exhausted enough that I said he could name him whatever he wanted. He could have named him Thor for all I cared by that time.

And that is how our poor baby finally got his name. I guess he really doesn't need a name, anyway, though, because we mostly call him 'Baby', 'Bud', and 'The Kid' and that seems to be working out quite nicely.