What's in a name? Especially a "C" name!

Someone asked me again last week -- "What's up with the "C" names?" I don't think it's all that unusual. All the Dahm's have "J" names, all the Dugger's have "J" names, so far all the DeBoer's have "E" names.....

Honestly, it started with Clayton. It was one of the few names we could agree on when I was PG with him. We just started flipping thru the baby name book and each writing down -- well, I probably wrote them down and Joe got veto power, is actually more how it went. I was pretty adamant about using Joseph as a middle name, so everything I picked had to pass that litmus test, too. Clayton just means "clay settlement" -- nothing all that special. But, it does shorten to Clay, which I think is still quite a masculine name. Had he been a girl, we should have named him Natalie -- meaning born at Christmas (since he was due on Christmas Day). I think we finalized the decision in the van on the way to the hospital on the evening of December 6th, 1998. It was really unintentional that we had two "C's" -- Chris and Clayton.

Jump forward a few years and now we are PG with Curtis. He arrived quite a few weeks early, but we had already decided that it was to be another "C". You couldn't have 2 "C's" and not add a third. The youngest always gets teased about being adopted anyway -- if his/her name doesn't fit in the older ones will have more ammunition! Curtis Wayne for a boy and Carolyn Marie (?) for a girl. I think we debated much less about this one that Clayton's or Cole's. I think I just spit it out and we both liked it. Curtis, again, shortens to Curt -- still masculine and goes with Wayne (my dad's middle name). We liked it and it means "courteous" -- ironic that it's our Curtis, huh?

Now 2 1/2 years later -- now here we are again. And the ultrasound lady is pretty sure that she saw a "ding dong" there on the screen. She won't confirm it, but won't deny it either. We would have been surprised if Cole had been a girl! Cole Thomas was, again, decided on in the hospital or on the way there. We had chewed up a lot of "C" names -- many we thought were too feminine, or just plain "old" -- (Claude, Clarence) -- or they sounded too close to Chris or Clayton or Curtis. We didn't want any confusion about who mom was yelling at in the years to come!
Cole just means "coal; or dark one" -- which is funny 'cuz Cole is our blondest child. He does have the big brown eyes, though. Thomas just went with Cole in our minds. We started throwing out boy names after Cole and Thomas just stuck. It was also good in that none of the boys would have the same initials either. (You know how your analyze EVERYTHING when you are pregnant!)

So......there's the story. Nothing all that intentional, just something that began to happen and we followed thru with it. It's kind of nerdy, kind of clever, something to talk about, something to make the younger boys probably even more anonymous than they would have been already.

(We have a family in church with 4 boys - older than ours, the youngest there is in 7th grade. This 7th grader got paired up with Curtis for a project for 1st grade for school. I asked Curtis who is partner was and he told me "one of these H------ boys." I got a little snippy with him about that. "Do you want to be known as 'one of those Pr----- boys' for the rest of your life?" "You need to call him Justin -- not 'one of those H------ boys".)

Anyway -- there you go -- all the "C's" -- Christopher Scott, Clayton Joseph, Curtis Wayne, Cole Thomas. We could name our little homestead like some kind of ranch -- the 4C's - circle C, etc. etc.