After the initial wave of joy and jubilation at finding out we were expecting a baby had washed over us, my wife and I got down to the brass tacks of expectant parenting...topics like Hospitals, Pediatricians, Childcare all came up and were addressed.Amongst all the "I want/don't want" conversations we had with one another, one thing came up - a question we admittedly had no answer for :
"What are we going to name the baby?"
A confused Shawn and Gus face is appropriate here, because honestly we had no idea.
The only thing my wife and I had agreed on previously was that he'd have an English Language name, a name that would enable our son to define his own life; not have his life experiences be defined by his name.
We wanted something off the beaten path but not so outlandish that the name translates to "My parents hate me."
Cut to the Christmas Holiday season of 2011. This Holiday was especially dear to us for obvious reasons, the pregnancy was progressing nicely and the baby was doing really well as was Mommy.
Relatives and friends we hadn't seen and/or heard from in years came from all over the country came to see my wife and specifically - her Baby Bump. This was great for my wife who has always been a big Family person, and relishes any function or reason to hang out with he family.
During the festivities it was pointed out to us that the baby had already done something we couldn't, he had united our families for the first time in a long time. No amount of invitations or dropped hints had brought family to our doorstep the way our baby had.
We decided to go with that, his uniting our family, as the basis for his name.
Firing up the ol' web browser and typing in "Unity, Unifier, Uniter" to it. resulted in a few names and while perusing the list, my eyes paused on "Ace"......there it was, our minds were made up. DONE.
WIN.
Cue the months of "Are you sure?", "I don't like that.", "That's a big nam ego live up to, you're setting him up for failure." and even "He's going to be a gangster and have a gambling problem." that we had to endure. We also learned and had to come to terms with this simple fact -
Everyone wants to believe they are a unique force in the world, one that thinks beyond the parameters of the norm, until it's time to prove it, at which point they recede into the comfortable confines of being just like everyone else.
Did we have our doubts about his name? Sure we did, we weren't oblivious to the fact that his name would be different than most, that was the whole point, we wanted his generation of our families to have a different experience than we did. We stuck to our guns and if you ask us we made the right choice, for us.
