Category: family

  • Naming Conventions: Cultural and Family Considerations for Naming a Child

    Naming a child is a big deal. Especially since there is a high likelihood they will be stuck with it the rest of their lives. In an ideal situation a person’s name is one of the top three or four things that they build their lifelong identity around. (Gender, faith, culture, to name a few others.)

    But selecting a name isn’t just about the identity of the child will take on for themselves. It’s also about a few other things…

    • Since the parents chose, the name reflects the parents initially as much as the child indefinitely.
    • The child’s name isn’t alone as it is in pairing with its siblings and other members of the family. They need to make some sense as a group of names.
    • The child’s name has to fit in culturally with it’s peers. Picking a name that is too popular could result in them not having a distinct name. Picking a name that is too obscure could lead to no one knowing what planet you came from!
    • Some names generate stigma just because of other famous people by that name. Some names you say and others automatically associate that name with a serial killer or a rock star.
    • Naming of a child can be a wonderful way to honor a person.
    • Within your friendships you need to make sure you aren’t naming your child someone else’s “dream name.“
    • As a parent, you’ll be uttering this name for the rest of your life. So it needs to be something you like saying.

    Here’s how we picked our first two children’s names:

    Megan Elisabeth – The first Christmas that Kristen and I were dating I bought her a pearl ring that meant a lot to us. Though we only knew one another for 6 months we knew we’d be together for a lifetime. The ring had three tiny pearls. One for each child we’d hope to one day have. (Crazy, I know considering we always wanted three, stopped after two, and then are now having the third.) So as we debated what to name our first child, it kind of all got settled in the symbolism of the name Megan. Greek for pearl. Then I made an executive decision and told Kristen I wanted Megan’s middle name to be Elisabeth, after her. My hope is that one day Megan will grow up to be a woman of God like her mom.

    Paul Garret- This name came long before we were married. Paul & Garret are the patriarchs of both of our families and we wanted to honor them by naming our first son after them. Paul McLane was a man I never met as he passed away a few years before I was born. But I grew up under the legend of Paul McLane. It was clear throughout my childhood that my grandfather was the person who helped hold the whole thing together… and when he passed the whole thing just kind of started spinning out of control. I want my son to be the kind of guy that holds things together. Garret is Kristen’s grandfather. When we met I instantly liked him. I man of few words and great wisdom. To illustrate this man’s heart fast-forward to his final impact. Nearly 1000 people came to visit Garret (Barney, as everyone knew him) at his funeral. And as I stood by and listened to stories they all had the same thread. “You probably don’t know me, but your husband helped me when I was in trouble. He leant me some money to pay my rent.” (Or drove them to the doctor, or visited them when they were sick, or prayed for them when they came to the church after hours and he was gardening.) Oh, that my son would be like his grandfather… quietly serving the Kingdom of God.

    So, when it came to the third child… we were at a loss.

    We had all of this in our minds. And we struggled for nearly six months to find just the right one. Weighing all of this together takes something that seems so infinite and narrows the options. Literally, we talked about it from the day we found out we were expecting #3 until about 2 weeks ago. We tried a lot of things out, thought about it, sat on it, then kicked it to the curb.

    But we’ve finally landed on a names we both love. Weighing in the family considerations, cultural considerations, and even historical considerations. (My family has been in the United States for a long, long time!) We can’t wait to reveal the name. But, of course, we are waiting until he’s born.

    Addendum #1

    From 1995 – 2002 I worked for BlueCross BlueShielf of Illinois creating tens of millions (no exaggeration) of ID cards. In that, I noticed some crazy naming conventions which have totally shaped how we name our children. Here’s the most obvious one.

    The weird name rule: (About 90% of the time, this is true) If a couple has two normal names they are bound to name their first child something abnormal. But if one of the two of them has an abnormal name, their first child’s name will be normal.

    Example #1: Tom and Susan… will name their first child Zoe.

    Example #2: Tom and Zoe… will name their first child Susan.

    Addendum #2

    If you are a web nerd like me, it’s also important that the child’s domain name be available.

  • Time Lapse Video: Backyard Hummingbirds

    A few weeks ago we hung this little hummingbird feeder. We were amazed to discover that the hummingbirds (who nest in a tree in our backyard) discovered it within hours.

    Maybe it makes me sound old or stupid? But I don’t care. I love watching these amazing creatures in my backyard. And I love watching them up close when they are at the feeder.

    So every few days we take it down and clean out the little bottle of sugar water, then mix up some more for them. It’s really fun! We can’t believe how tame they are. (You can get like 6 inches from them.) And it’s really cool when they come close or “buzz the tower.”

    This morning, I thought it would be fun to set up my camera to take time lapse pictures while we went to the farmers market. All told, we captured about 2 hours of pictures… one every 10 seconds. 665 frames.

    The video above is the result.

    The song, as you may recognize, is from Jars of Clay. It’s called The Long Fall. (click here to buy it on iTunes)

  • Daddy Days

    This weekend, Kristen is off to Chicago with Erin for a girls getaway. Since I’m traveling a little over 1/5th of 2010, she certainly earned some time to herself.

    Kristen’s definition of a girls weekend is Thursday afternoon to midnight on Monday. I like her style.

    As we compared notes leading up to this trip we determined that this is the first time Kristen has ever done anything like this. It’s been fun to hear her talk about the trip for the last month or so, all the places she wants to visit, and of course– all of our favorite food places she wants to enjoy. (We lived there for 8 years. She is busy satisfying cravings for Johnnie’s Italian beef and Oatmeal shakes from Irazu. I’m totally jealous.)

    The flipside is that I’ve earned some solo time with Megan and Paul!

    So far, so good.

    I’m not going to lie. I love that I get this time to be with them like this.

    Last night, over a healthy dinner of tacos, rice and beans, and chips… we talked about all sorts of drama at school. Apparently, Foursquare provides endless playground theater that I was previously unaware of. There are some kids who like to steal the ball and throw it over the fence. Yeah, straight thugging.

    We don’t have overly adventurous plans for the rest of the weekend. Which leaves plenty of time to do what they love to do most. Relax and be kids.

    • Thursday night I was impressed that I could make a healthy, well-balanced meal that they actually ate. Roasted fish, roasted apples, and whole grain rice.
    • Friday was a marathon of driving as we went from school to the San Diego State ticket office back to the YS offices to the house then to dinner at Rubios. I felt like a soccer mom with all of that carting!
    • Today we plan on going to the nursery so we can start seedlings of our winter garden, doing some weeding and cutting of grass, relaxing in the afternoon, then going to the Aztec game a bit early to enjoy some of the tailgate festivities before SDSU plays Colorado State tonight.
    • Sunday, I hope to keep it simple. Church in the morning and then finish painting the dining room while the NFL games are on. At some point, Paul needs to do his homework.
    • Monday, I’m just happy to get them to school. We will spend some time in the early evening making sure the kids rooms are clean(ish) before mom gets home.

    Goals:

    1. Quantity time.
    2. No trips to the ER.
    3. Keep the house clean.
    4. Convince the animals to sleep in tomorrow for daylight savings time.
    5. Create some memories.

  • Halloween Success

    It’d been a couple of years since I have been home for Halloween.

    So, I was thrilled when the kids informed me that I was taking them trick-or-treating and Kristen was going to stay home and hand out candy.

    They quickly covered several blocks of our neighborhood. (It was fun to see the same neighbors again, without the hovering helicopters and SWAT teams of the night before. What a difference 24 hours makes!)

    One thing I adore about our neighborhood is how friendly everyone is. The neighborhood is a fun mix of middle-class families, immigrants/refugees, retired folks, and college students. That was on full display all night.

    Three favorite moments:

    1. There is one neighbor who goes all out. They set up their yard like a haunted house, complete with zombies and chainsaw masacres. Both of our kids fought the fear, smiled realizing it was all fake and for fun, and made it through. Paul kept telling himself, “Don’t chicken out” as he made his way to the porch. (They gave out full-sized candy bars, pretty cool)

    2. About an hour into their adventure both of them got very tired. As we were still several blocks from home they both just looked at me and said, “Can we walk straight home?” Then, as we were walking home, both Megan and Paul decided they needed to make one more stop. They wanted to go next door to visit our 80+ year old neighbors. They love that couple and have a special bond with them that is really cool. I loved that they wanted to see them and knew that “Mr. Stan” would want to see them in their costumes.

    3. I loved seeing and handing out candy to first-timers. Our community welcomes refugees from all over the world. The latest group hails from several African nations… and it was fun to see them try to figure out Halloween. The costumes were a little off and the concept of a cute plastic pumpkin as a candy storage device was lost along the way. But these kids got it, and the smiles on their faces were priceless.

    I love living in a country where one day we can have a police standoff and the next it is safe enough for children to wander around in the dark asking random houses for candy.

  • Time to move in

    Kristen and I had a realization a couple weeks back: We’ve lived in this house nearly two years and, in some ways, we never moved in.

    • There are a lot of boxes in the garage filled with stuff we don’t need, but never took the time to toss or give away.
    • Since we moved into this house we’ve bought nearly no furniture. We’ve had things we’ve used from previous places we’ve lived, but nothing for here.
    • All of the walls are still “rental apartment white”  and bare of things hung up even though the landlord said we could paint and do whatever.

    In short, we’ve lived here for two years but never fully made it our home.

    With baby #3 on the way in February, plus a rental relationship we actually enjoy, we know we aren’t going to move any time soon.

    About Southern California living: There’s a misconception that all of Southern California is a horribly expensive place to live. This hasn’t been our experience at all. It’s not cheap– but it’s not unlike any metropolitan area we’ve lived. (Chicago, Detroit) Renting a 3 or 4 bedroom house in a safe neighborhood is going to be expensive in any big city. When we look at our total housing budget for our house in Romeo, MI compared to our house here, it’s probably only 10-15% higher. How? We pay a lot more in a lump sum to rent but that is made up for in smaller bills in other areas. We don’t pay property taxes, renters insurance is a lot cheaper than homeowners, and our utilities are about 33% of what they were in Michigan. Of course, if we lived in a beach neighborhood or a super nice suburb it’d be more expensive. And if we compared square footage to square footage it wouldn’t be the same as our house here is about 50% of the overall size of our house in Michigan. But it is a little bit of a myth that all of Southern California is crazy expensive to live in.

    Our “make a rental feel like a home” plan:

    • Buy a deep freezer for the garage so we can store up on stuff better.
    • Paint the living/dining rooms, finally hang some pictures in those spaces.
    • Buy a new sofa/love seat for the living room.
    • Build a bed frame for under Paul’s loft with storage underneath. (He stopped sleeping in his loft and has slept on a mattress on the floor for about a year!)
    • Install a wall of storage cabinets in Megan’s room. (Since she’ll be sharing with Tres.)
    • Spend a little time and money sprucing up the front of the house landscaping-wise and get more serious about the backyard garden.
    • Get a nice grill so we will be able to enjoy our patio area a bit more in the warm winter months to come.

    It’s really not a lot. But the hope is that we’ll be able to do a little here and there that will make this place feel like home for the next couple of years.

  • Of BluRay and Websites

    It’s been a fun week.

    It’s been a crazy productive week. Not only in my work life, but also in some fun stuff at home.

    Our garden continues to bring us joy as well as an over-abundance of fresh produce. And the recent egg recall has only solidified our desire to get a few chickens and produce our own eggs. With almost a full season of success under our belts we are also looking for opportunities to expand the garden. I have two spots in mind, one in our yard that our landlord/neighbor had strawberries in, and our other neighbor has an abandoned lot with some old garden plots in it that we’d love to sharecrop with.

    We moved our CSA pick-up from the North Park farmers market to the Little Italy Mercato. No judgement on one farmers market over the other, I’m just excited that I get to go now since the pick-up is on Saturday.

    Yesterday, I pulled out our massive yellow tomato plants. They were producing 5-6 pounds of tomatoes per week and we just couldn’t keep up with them. So I’ve turned off that factory and we’re repairing that area of the garden for another summer planting of something less invasive. (It was nearly 20 feet tall!) I harvested one last batch of tomatoes and we have them laying in the sun today… sun dried yellow tomatoes!

    The kids have about 2 weeks left of summer break. We are slowly coming around to the idea that this means we need to start school shopping. The good news, it’s pretty easy at a school where everyone wears uniforms! But, every still needs new shorts, shirts, shoes, and backpacks.

    Kristen is officially in the second trimester with baby #3. She’s feeling a lot better as morning sickness subsides. We’re still in denial that we are going to need to buy all that baby stuff again. And my head kind of explodes when I realize that our Passat isn’t going to work with 3 kids. That said, we’re totally jazzed about this baby. Big surprise to us, but we’re going to enjoy it!

    Last weekend we upgraded our DVD player to a BluRay player. By upgraded I mean that our 1999 DVD player finally stopped working and we didn’t have a way to watch movies for a few months. We watched our first BluRay movie the other day… it’s amazing! Plus, it works seamlessly with Netflix online. (We already used the Wii for this)

    Since I’m being random, another early marriage purchase that just died is our toaster. Since we haven’t bought or looked at toasters since 1997… we both giggled that you can now get toasters that double as egg cookers. We might just have to do that. It’s a whole new world!

    In web news, I’ve been very productive. I re-skinned Kristen’s blog last week. And I also totally designed and launched a site last weekend that I’m very excited about. On top of that, we’ve reactivated Beyond the Zoo. It’s funny looking at the stats of BTZ. Even though we haven’t put much up on the site it still gets great traffic from Google. (50+ visitors per day, not bad!)

  • Kristen is Blogging Again

    Yup, Kristen has got her blog going again. I know she plans on talking more about our families shift to an organic lifestyle, gardening, shell hunting, and fun stuff for our kids.

    Kristen was a pretty successful mom-blogger when that fad was hot. She got burnt out with all the free product people sent us to review so I think she’s going to avoid that this time around.

    She and I sat down yesterday  to talk about a new look for her blog… let me know what you think. We were looking to create something fresh, open, and elegant. (Yes, the shell is one she found in a neighborhood in Haiti. Only Kristen could find a shell in a path a mile from the ocean amidst all that garbage!)

  • Date night with the kids

    Kristen hosted a girls night for the ladies of our community group. So Paul, Megan, and I disappeared and went to see Toy Story 3.

    One thing I haven’t adjusted to about Southern California living is how expensive the movies are. I still grimace at paying $11.50 for an adult and $8.50 for a child when in Michigan it was a whole lot less. And a lot of the major theaters don’t even have matinees! Seriously, what is up with that?

    To express my inner-cheapskate, we went to Rite-Aid in our neighborhood and bought movie snacks to eat on the way to Fashion Valley Mall. By the time we got to the movies we were hopped up on sugar and ready for the flick.

    As for the movie– it was great. I don’t know how they managed to keep both the Toy Story (and Shrek) franchises going so strong. The plots and the quality of animation just keeps getting better.

    I don’t think the movie was the point of the night any more than loading everyone up on sugar. It was just nice to get a few hours to relax and laugh with my kids.

    I relish that.

    In other news. A new round of college guys are moving in across the street. With school at SDSU about to kick off another year, people watching is back!

  • Paul’s Birthday Present

  • Big Surprise Headed Our Way!

    We are both surprised and stoked to be expecting our third child this February.

    No ideas on a name yet. But rest assured that we will buy the URL.

    Pray for us. Especially, Megan and Paul.