sursly

Since it is likely that quite a few posts on here will be about parenting, I’m going to do a little introduction.

Jonah, this is The Interwebs.
Interwebs, Jonah.

You two good? Okay. Good.

J was born on August 2nd, 2005, not quite nine months after conception. We opted out of the ultrasounds and decided a “surprise” gender would be swell. Swell. Many pregger nights were spent dwelling on what to name him/her. Anything in the top 100 for the past five years was out, so that left us with some sweet options. Like Mable. Or Eugene. (sorry Mables and Eugenes). Or Murphy. (not sorry)

We kept coming back to this website like dope fiends, at first because of all the pretty colors, then because we realized it was a pretty nifty contraption. We even set up an online poll (omg!) for friends and family to vote on our top five favorite names. Thinking back now I can’t remember all ten names, just the top boy and girl names.

Lydia, or Elliott.

So after many a hot summer night, I wake up to a moist bed (not pee), a girlfriend in contractions, and baby on the way. And a cool eight hours later and he (He!) is out.

And he doesn’t look like a Elliott. Or Lydia.

So the little guy didn’t have a name. This has to be the strangest thing I have ever experienced in my life. The birth, very cool, not too weird. The pregnancy, a little weirder, a little cooler. But sitting in a hospital room looking at the tiny human being you created and not knowing what to name him, a name that he will be forced to live with, made fun of, and identify as until he’s 12 and disowns us…definitely strange.

But it’s all good because the family is visiting, and the nurse comes every hour to poke Megan, or the nameless child, and it’s in the back of our head as something we should take care of. My mother calls to suggest names, and eventually brings in a few more baby books. And everyone is waiting. And we’re not sure if Colby sounds too country club or if Holden is too “hey I’ve read Catcher In The Rye too!” but nothing is fitting. There are no worthy family names to pass on (sorry Douglas and Richards, not our baby) and everyone’s suggestions suck. “No I’m not naming him Aiden or Evan or Jacob.”

And then we remember a quiet, unassuming name that Megan I vetoed during the first trimester.

“How about Jonah?”
“Jonah?”
“Yeah, he looks like a Jonah.”
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t we think of this name, like, 6 months ago, or was that Jonas?”
“I vetoed Jonas, it was Jonah, and you didn’t like it then.”
“Oh.”

And thats it. Little did I know of the implications in naming my child after a character from some obscure book called The Bible. But it stuck. We had never met a Jonah at the time, and to this day have only seen one, and he wasn’t nearly as cool as ours. Ours is better. Way better.

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