Name Yourself, Kid.

So, we´re letting the baby pick out his middle name.

How does he get to choose, you ask?  It´s fairly easy, thanks to the calendar of saints´ feast days.

Now, for those who aren´t Catholic, one might not be familiar with these beauties.  But every day of the year is commemorated to whichever officially cannonized saint died that day. So most days, there are a number of names to choose from.

This may sound kind of weird and off-the-deep-end, but it used to be a traditional way of naming children in Mexico, even as recently as the 1940s and ´50s.  I´m not making this up, as I have a number of friends and neighbors in their sixties and seventies and LOTS of these fine people have about 11 brothers and sisters.  Let´s face it, when you´re faced with naming more than five children, I´m willing to bet that it gets tricky to find (and agree) on decent names.

So let´s just rely on the Saints´ Day Calendar.

While completely unintentional, my other two children were born on their saints´ day, even though we picked out their names well in advance.  For instance, we picked out Joey´s name before we got married--five years before he was born.  And then he up and decided to be born on the day we chose for his middle name.

So now when he tells me he doesn´t like his middle name, I can retort back that he choose it, not me.
And that´s true.  Mostly.

Part of what convinced us to name Clara Clara was that our book of 10,000 baby names listed her due date (and birthday) as a Santa Clara Day.  However, now that I´ve been investigating on the internet, I can´t find a single Santa Clara for January 28th.  The closest I can find is an obscure St. Cannera--a hard-headed Irish broad whose story I think is a hoot (and reminds me of Clara, even though she´s not willing to admit it yet).

But a Santa Clara on January 28th?  If anyone knows anything about her, please let me know!

Since coincidence has worked so well for us in the past, and we can´t agree on a decent middle name for this guy, we´ll let
fate take over and Little Boy can pick his own name.  I was hoping he would have been born this past Saturday, so his middle name could be Antonio.

Apparently, he wasn´t so interested in that one.

My luck, he´ll decide that he´s comfortable until November 1st, and then decide to be born on All Saints´ Day.

Then we would be forced to be creative and make a decision.   Aargh.