Dang, I missed the March/Winter name roundup!! Sorry, @sophiekihm!!
Happy to share our Hugo Henry joined us in January, and now at ten weeks old he is a whopping 14.5 lbs. We are so in love! Big sister Vivian (5 y.o.) and brother Bennett (2.5 y.o.) are doing well with the new addition and remain quite besotted.
About choosing Hugo:
We had a much tougher time naming this baby! The first time, we had a long list of possibilities we slowly whittled down over time. Girl names are simply easier! For our older son, we had a single name we agreed on fairly early, so we had no runner-up list to start with here.
So, in November I presented my husband with a list of 48 names, (this is the actual number, I just went back and counted for you!) and he vetoed all but three⦠you can imagine my reaction! I had to abandon a lot of favorites: Jonas, Soren, Mattias, Callahan, Dashiell, Miles. We added one of his favorites to the list, leaving us with four finalists.
In the hospital, I had a slow induction so we had lots of time to talk through each one. Turns out the other finalists each had a strike against them: Calvin means bald, Davis is popular in the South because of Jefferson Davis, and we donāt like the nickname Griff for Griffin. This left us with Hugo! It has a great meaning (mind, intellect), itās sweet and will wear well from childhood to adulthood, and sounds distinct from but harmonious with our other kids names.
Henry, his middle name, cames from wanting to honor my beloved step-grandmother Wendy, who passed away in 2021. We didnāt want to go Wendell, but her father was named Henry. Bingo! Also found out afterword that Henry was the first LytIe (my family) to come to the United States, a connection which my grandfather really loves. Feels like kismet.
As I have thought about what my criteria for naming all of them has been, I wanted them to have (relatively) timeless names, something that wonāt tie them to a specific generation, but are well-known and established as first names.
Also have discovered in my research that all three are from names that came to the UK in the middle ages with the Normans, which explains to me their vaguely French-British feel.
We did get some very weird family reactions, including my dad saying it was āethnicā and my in-laws asking (the first time we spoke to them after he was born!) if we would change it. What can you do but laugh?! We have also had many many people say they love it. Personally, I definitely still love the name, but as with my other kids, it just feels weird to call this tiny grub by a human name?? Hopefully soon it will feel quite natural, they really do become their names and then you canāt imagine calling them anything else.
Thanks for all your support along the way, Berries. I love their names so much that I feel like I have given my kids a valuable lifelong gift, itās definitely a feeling of satisfaction of a job well done!