I shall call him Squishy and he shall be mine...

...and he shall be my Squishy.

I was on the BlogFrog a while back, and there was a thread asking for favorite boy names for someone who was expecting but having trouble finding names she liked. A boy name was something we picked out easily (after a few back and forths and vetoes...), but if we'd had a girl there might've been trouble. Even though the decision was easy, there was a little trickery involved in getting Martin to agree.

It's not as bad as it might sound, honestly. I would not want to deceive someone about something as important as our child's name. But there's still a story here.

A few years ago (it was fall of 2006, I believe), Martin and I went to see the movie The Covenant. It was a so-so movie, but one of the lead characters was named Caleb. I'd heard the name before and always liked it, and during the movie Martin leaned over to me and said "I like Caleb for a boy's name" (this was before we had decided to try for a baby). I said I liked it too, and that was the last we talked about it. Until I got pregnant.

Early on in the pregnancy when we were just kind of throwing name ideas around I mentioned Caleb and Martin vetoed it. I was a little disappointed because I still really liked that name. I let it go for the time being, and we moved on through hundreds (I'm sure!) of names. On a side note, I didn't want to find out the sex of the baby, but Martin did. The ultrasound tech wrote her finding on a sheet of paper and sealed it in an envelope. Martin took it with him to work, looked at it, and never told a soul what he had read on the paper.

But I digress....

SO. One night later on in the pregnancy I had gotten home from a shift at the nursing home, and was getting ready for a shift at the cleaning job I had with the Dept. of Transportation (MnDOT). I saw on TV that the movie The Covenant was on later that afternoon on one of the movie channels. I "casually" mentioned this to Martin and reminded him how much we liked that movie when we had seen it in the theater (ok, so I stretched the truth a bit...). A couple hours later I get a text while at work.

Martin: How about Caleb??
Me: I like that name!!

I called Martin and said something to the effect that Caleb is a name that keeps coming up so why don't we just stick with that since it's the only one we really agreed on. Martin agreed, and so it was to be. We shall call him Kaleb....

Oh. And the spelling? We really weren't trying for anything trendy, I like the name spelled with a "C" just fine. But since I had semi-tricked Martin into the name I wanted, I let him pick the middle name (while maintaining veto rights of course). Martin really liked the name Christian for a middle name, and we didn't want his initials to be C.C., so he became Kaleb Christian. 

And yes, I have since confessed to Martin how Kaleb really came about as the top choice for our boy's name. He thought it a little sneaky, but agreed that our boy's name suits him well and he'd have it no other way.