The Name Game

If you're not on my Facebook, you may not know that I'm married. And if you don't know that, then you definitely don't know that we're expecting my first child in November. Fraternal twins run in my wife's family, and for a couple weeks we thought we might be having twins, so we came up with sets of possible baby names. Now we know it's just one, and everyone but me is convinced it's a boy, so we've been focusing on boy's names.

When we thought it might be twins, I was all for naming the two boys Mario and Luigi. As video game character names go, they have the benefit of easy recognition, and more importantly, are real world names. So when we found out it's a singleton, my idea was to combine the names and christen our potential son Mario Luigi.

But now, the whole issue of my family's naming legacy has come up. As you can see in my profile, my middle name is Maxfield. It was also my father's first name. And his father's middle name. And his father's first name. I'm not sure how far back the name goes, but it's at least four generations. I was willing to make Maxfield my son's middle name, but my Mom wants to keep the pattern going. And she's recruited my wife.

So there's a campaign in my family right now to name our son (we don't for sure it's a boy yet, but everyone is seeing it as a forgone conclusion) Maxfield Mario Luigi. Maxfield Eric was also suggested, but I'm not into that at all, so I'm striking that name from the running. I think it was only suggested to stroke my ego, anyway.

So now I'm trying to decide, do I want to name my son Maxfield Mario Luigi? Does anyone out there have an opinion on the matter? Let me know.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights