Our son, Edward Wallace, was born on August 30. But I’ve still got several “Dadding” blogs written during the pregnancy period. Before I get into the new stuff about active parenthood, I’m going to finish the saga that got us here. Including this post, which I wrote back in February, but that I wasn’t ready to share until now.

Name Game
(In which Erin and I prove that naming your child does not necessarily require an executive order)

Frankly, I don’t know why some people act like naming a child is a big deal. Erin and I did it over dinner. And that wasn’t even the purpose of the dinner, it just happened to come up in conversation while we were waiting for our Copeland’s King Cake Cheesecake (which we highly recommend, by the way). It was probably less than an hour from the time we started discussing it until we had settled on our choices. Already, we decided, we were amazing parents.

It’s odd — when it comes to choosing a title for a story I’ve written, I agonize for days, but naming a kid? No problem! Erin said I was the same way when it came to picking our wedding date. “I just said ‘When do you want to get married?’ and you said ‘How about June 14’?” she said. In fairness, though, once you settle questions of venue and availability, your actual wedding date doesn’t really matter all that much unless you’re choosing it for sentimental reasons, like the day you first met or Stan Lee’s birthday. Picking a name — that’s a more substantial decision.

When my sister was most recently pregnant, she chose a name in a very traditional way. She got a book (To Kill a Mockingbird, I think) and started highlighting all the names she liked, then she gave the book to her husband so he could do the same thing, then she grew increasingly frustrated as it became more and more apparent that he’d totally forgotten the book existed. She finally settled on her baby’s name when a time-traveler from the future appeared and begged her not to name him “Ethan.”

“Why? Will he become an evil dictator or something?”

“No. There are just way too many people named ‘Ethan’ 20 years from now.”

Despite the brevity of our conversation, I know that choosing a child’s name is significant. You’re setting the tenor for their entire life, after all. You don’t name a kid “Jarvis” unless you want to lock him into a future as a butler. “Bambi” has a 79 percent chance of becoming a stripper. Any Wu-Tang name will either land them in jail or on the Billboard charts, so you’re rolling the dice there. All I’m saying, though, is that once we eliminated names we definitely didn’t want, it wasn’t too hard.

The only real point of contention between us came when Erin suggested the name Patrick. It’s a fine name with a proud legacy and it wonderfully represents her family and her Irish heritage, and I would have been fine with it except for the fact that our last name is Petit, and there’s no way in hell I was going to send a kid to an American public school with the initials P.P. Erin said I was overreacting, I said she had too much faith in the goodness of children. She brought up Spider-Man, I pointed out that there may once have been a time when a child could be nicknamed “Beaver” with no repercussions, but today is not that day. She asked if my cousins Philip or Patricia ever had problems, I said that if they did, maybe they just didn’t want to talk to everybody about that time John Harris stole my hat and threw it in a urinal. She said I must have been majorly damaged in elementary school, and I had to concede she may have had a point there.

Any other objections I had were all teacher-based. Every teacher mentally keeps a list of the most obnoxiously frustrating students we ever teach, because we can never give one of our own children those names. It would be like giving a kid the name of your ex-boyfriend, except people are generally more forgiving if you tell them a name makes you want to put their face through a windshield if you say it’s an ex instead of a student.

Finally, again as a teacher, I insisted our kid have a name his or her future educators could pronounce. We’ve all heard of the twins named Lemonjello and Orangello, or the girl with the exquisite name “Ladasha” (spelled “La-a”). I cannot verify that these names ever really existed. Very likely, these children are apocryphal. I’m just saying, based on some of the names you people do give your children, I wouldn’t be surprised. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone named their child “Apocryphal Jones” because they read it in this post and thought it was pretty.

I’m just saying, speaking as a teacher, it’s really frustrating to have to guess what to call a child whose name looks like somebody spilled a bowl of Alpha-Bits just because their parents didn’t want them to have the same name as any other kid in the class. I have no problem believing someone would write “Phr3q’trwilli-HenryKissinger” on a birth certificate and say “But we pronounce it ‘Frank’.” Yeah, I know you like those designer names because they’re “unique.” Well I gotta tell you, naming a child “Adolph” in 2017 would be pretty unique too, but you ain’t finding that name on a novelty license plate at Six Flags either.

All that covered, we started to talk about names that didn’t make us wretch. The girl’s name — which I’m not going to share here because it’s still a little personal — took only mild deliberation. The boy name was easy. I’ve wanted to use my grandfather’s name, “Wallace,” as a middle name for a very long time. Erin wanted to use one of her father’s names, “Deen Edward.” Since her brother is also named “Deen,” I suggested taking her Dad’s middle name to avoid any confusion. Plus, I just liked how the name rolled off the tongue. Sure, “Edward Wallace” may sound like a hard-hitting news reporter from the 60s, but as the world is sorely lacking in those these days, it’s okay with me.

“Did we just pick our baby names?” she asked me.

“I think we did.”

“We are awesome at this.”

And then we high-fived.

While driving.

We still need to work on a few things.

You may have heard, Blake and Erin have a baby, so he hopes you’ll allow him to remind you he’s got a bunch of books and short stories for sale on Amazon, and suggest you follow his author’s page on Facebook.