Sunday, July 24, 2011

A Name for a New Person

We have a name:

A name for Baby #3

Spelled like (and named after) Clive Staples. This has been our boy name that we've sort of mulled around since before we even started having kids and it is really fun to be actually using it. Rob has always pushed for using Clive instead but I just don't know about that. I am less opposed to the name Clive now than I have been in past years (a decade ago it sounded to me like the name of a bully or maybe a cute dog, but now there's Clive Owen and a lot more quirky old-fashioned boy names going around) but I like Lewis better and we are going to stick with that. We are still a little undecided on middle names and are tossing around two family name possibilities, one from Rob's side and one from mine. There are mild problems with both, unfortunately; one of them rhymes with our last name and one of them, when combined with the first name, is a comedy duo from the 40s and 50s. We'll see; Violet's middle name was totally a last-minute decision and I love it so we'll just have to wait and see how things shake out.

Things around here have made some strides toward being ready for a new baby to come into the house, although not enough to keep me from having classic anxiety dreams (you know, where I have been enrolled in a class all year but haven't gone to it once and am now about to fail, or where I'm in a grocery store and can't find anything I need to buy). My subconscious wants me to TAKE CARE OF WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE ALREADY.

Have I already explained that we aren't decorating a nursery this time around? There are two main reasons.
  1. Neither Grace nor Violet actually slept in their rooms until they were close to a year old. The nurseries ended up functioning as charmingly decorated storage rooms.
  2. Our house has two bedrooms upstairs (currently an office and a guest room) and two in the basement (the master and the one that Grace and Violet share now). I don't really want to shuffle the furniture and put the girls upstairs until after Violet turns 3, for convenience and ease of nighttime parenting and whatnot. 
So our new little person is officially going to bunk in our room (just like our other babies have done unofficially) and hopefully he will not resent his lack of nursery when he learns about it. Thus, the rearranging we need to do is pretty minimal and I have gotten a start on it, despite what my subconscious thinks. I organized our master closet to make room for some storage drawers for baby clothes, added some under-bed storage boxes to our room, and made plans to get our changing table back in use as such. I think next weekend I am going to have Rob go up in the attic and get down all the baby stuff to clean and set up around the house-- the cosleeper that attaches to our bed , the bouncy seat, the car seat, and so forth. We will still be 5 weeks out from my due date then, which I admit is kind of early to have all that in the house. Or maybe it's not? I have lost all sense of perspective on this and I just need for it to be done.

I did get through a large pile of baby laundry recently. The little diapers are all clean and neatly arranged in their basket and I found all my slings and babywearing gear. And what else does a cliché of a hippie attachment parenting mama need, right? Clothes, I suppose. As you would probably guess, I did not have much in the way of boy or gender neutral clothes. That is, up until about a month ago. In the space of 2 weeks, I got hand-me-down baby clothes from 3 different friends, one of whom had twin boys, and now we are AWASH in baby boy clothes, swimming in a sea of blue outfits. I feel so grateful and overwhelmed with their generosity, and I am so happy to be giving these clothes another round of use instead of buying new ones (the Earth says "yay!"), and AAACK WHERE DO I STORE IT ALL?! Really, I think we are pretty well outfitted through the 12-month size and I have been surprised anew at just how many tiny outfits can fit in one load of laundry as I've sorted through my new stash.

Some sweet friends here in Salt Lake are throwing me a baby shower in a few weeks and I am really excited about it. There isn't a lot that we "need" for the new baby, between the gear we have already (thankfully we bought everything big/expensive in gender-neutral colors) and the hand-me-downs and our general minimalist approach to parenting and whatnot. There are some things that I put on a baby registry at Amazon, but there isn't a lot (and even less that I'll need at the very beginning) and it is really specific things (OK, I admit it-- I am picky about baby stuff) so we decided to go a different direction for the shower. They are doing a "fill the freezer" shower where instead of gifts everybody brings a meal or something for us to put in our freezer and pull out in those intense newborn weeks. I love this idea, especially given the logistics of our specific situation. And what I am really looking forward to is an afternoon of celebrating this new person coming into the world and being encouraged and supported by our community here.

That sounds especially lovely to me right now because I am a bit in the dumps. I am sleeping TERRIBLY and it is hot and oh, I feel so huge. It doesn't seem very real that we get to meet a tiny new person in just a few weeks; instead I just feel enormous and quasi-miserable. I don't really feel an end in sight at this point and my brain is having a hard time connecting all the low-level wretchedness with the end result of a BABY HOORAY. I am hoping that taking some more visible getting-ready steps will help, and I am working to cultivate an attitude of thankfulness about my healthy uncomplicated pregnancy. Six more weeks...

9 comments:

Unknown said...

very nice name (and cute title for the post!).

amydove said...

Yay, great name! And I love the fill the freezer shower idea! What a great suggestion for multiple baby households.

I clearly have no idea what you are going through and no idea how to make it seem better. I'll just send you happy thoughts and hope that the next few weeks go smoothly!

amydove said...

P.S. I find the decision to share the baby name fascinating. Almost none of my friends will tell the name in advance. They claim that they don't want people to say it is a bad name. Who are these horrible people that would tell someone their name is bad? And do these horrible people really keep it to themselves after the baby is born? Is the whole secretive thing really a way to keep something private between the parents (which is fine and seems a much more logical reason to me)?

Renee Davis Meyer said...

First of all, I am reminded again that you are a delightful and refreshing person, and I am so happy that we're friends.

Secondly, LOVE the name (though I really dig Clive as well), and am resisting the urge to sit here and try to figure out what middle names you're considering from the clues you gave. What in the world rhymes with Silge? Willie?

And lastly... Totally agree with Amy above. I am mystified by the current trend to keep baby names under lock and key in order to keep people from saying negative things. Who does that?

Love you friend! Hope your perspective is lifted, or that at least you find a comfortable spot under the AC. I can't imagine - I was preg in the dead of Nebraska winter and thought I would die from hot, especially at night. The maddest I've ever been at Matt was at 8 mos, when I made one of my nightly trips to the bathroom and came back to find him laying in my spot, making it even hotter than it already was. I was irrationally enraged. Poor man, it was 2 degrees outside and I had the fan on, he was just trying to find a warm spot... :)

Eva said...

I join the others in liking the name, and I also applaud your decision to share it before the birth. The cases I know are not so much people openly criticizing a chosen name, but giving their opinion about it in a way that ends up being a criticism in disguise.

Five/six weeks seem like a lot right now, but you have been through this before, and you know that once it's all done, you forget about the misery very quickly. It sounds like little Lewis chose a particularly hot summer to get here though. Hang in there.

Carlie said...

What a cool name! We considered Louis (the French spelling) for Reid in honor of A's grandad but we obviously went a different direction. C.S. is a great person to be name for though. :D I dig Clive too. I think it is edgy and clever and very happy and it reminds me of chives which might be bad but it happens to make me happy. Yay baby names!

Love that you are just planning on your bedroom being the nursery this time around. Seems somehow very releasing.

Love the drawing in the post header. Who is the artist?

Laura said...

What a lovely name!! I think it's perfect. I'm curious to hear your middle name choice... we had a hard time with Lilly's and about 2 weeks before her birth, we finally settled on using my middle name which is also my mom's middle name. I still wish we had come up with something more creative, but we tried for months... I must have the pronunciation of your last name wrong. In my head I hear it as one syllable... but you pronounce the "e" on the end?

I also think you're smart not to worry about a nursery... especially if you didn't use it much with the first two babies! I stressed about finishing our nursery (it's still not done!) before Lilly was born, and we haven't spent much time in there at all so far.

Those last few weeks are really hard. I was miserable. And you really don't want to hear that you'll forget all the misery once the baby arrives (even though it's true!) :-) I hope you can get some rest and stay cool!

Jill said...

Lewis is a great name! I'm intrigued by the middle name choices too. What rhymes with Silge?

Amy B said...

You maybe probably at some point have shared with me the way you maneuvered infant sleep - but I seem to not have retained it in my memory, so I was surprised to hear that your babies slept in your room for a year! The reason I bring it up is that our 10 month old is still in our room - in our bed. We never set a nursery up for him either, for various reasons! Anyway, I have mostly loved cosleeping, but now I am coming to the end of my rope because he is sleeping WORSE than a newborn, and I am dreading trying to sleep train a 10 month old, especially since I am not entirely comfortable with sleep training as a concept, except I NEED TO GET SOME SLEEP BEFORE I LOSE MY MIND. Ahem. So, I don't really know where I am going with this, but if you have any magical insights, they would be most welcome.

Also. I LOVE the name. LOVE LOVE LOVE.