We've got a writer

Max was up late one night this weekend with Tyler and I. He made reference to putting his name on his puzzle box so we said "you do it."  Max paused then agreed when we said he could do it. We handed him a sharpie and made him do a trial run on a piece of paper. No tracing, just 100% left handed Max and this is what we got. I personally am thrilled. He had everything going against him ... Late night, sharpie (that we told him not to get on his skin, which freaked him out a bit), no lines on the paper, and he had to do it from memory. Such a proud mommy!

The Name Wars

As some of you may know, and some of you have already assumed, Courtney and I generally have very different opinions on quite a few things. And they always seem to be big, "important" issues; in this case, the name of our first born. Whether we have a boy or girl, we knew it would take a while to agree on something. The subject has risen before in general conversation over the years, and every time either one of us threw out a possible name, the common reaction was "What!? That's not gonna happen." And so the battle began.

Courtney's suggestions are sometimes good, but I'm too stubborn to cross over to the dark side of Ethan and Cooper (no offense to any Ethans and Coopers reading this). I'm more of a Jason Faison kind of guy. I like a name that has a nice ring to it. Richie Rich, Mickey Rooney, Alli Bama, etc. Those are all names that you can't forget, right? Apparently so, but not in the positive way that I thought. We're "supposed" to have something traditional that won't embarrass the child. So I backed off a little and went with some more tame names. For a girl, we actually both found one that we liked...a lot. Aeva. Or is it Ava? Well, we both thought differently for different reasons and I'll just leave it at that. We were both hung on our versions and decided, "If we're not gonna do it my way, then we're not gonna do it at all." So that was that. Who knows what name we'll end up seeing on the birth certificate? We definitely know what it won't be. Jane Doe. We're two very proud parents-to-be and will definitely find something that suits us...tradition and phonetics included.