The power’s out! And posting from my phone makes me want to tear my hair out. So until tomorrow I’ll leave you with this question: What examples can you give in American culture (places, products, etc.) of saints’ names or references to Jesus or Mary, especially those who origins have been mostly forgotten? For example, Sophie the Giraffe (as I posted about the other day), or the city of Los Angeles (originally named for Our Lady).
Month: August 2015
Baby name consultant: Five-syllable firstname-middlename(s) combo needed for Baby Boy!
Amanda and her husband Vince are expecting their fifth born baby, a boy, and his firstname-middlename(s) combo has to equal five syllables. How I love a good name challenge!! 🙂
Their other kiddos are:
Oliver Lawrence
Elizabeth Joan (“Ellie or Ellie Jo … I sometimes call her Betty just because I can. 😉 “)
Theodore William (Theo)
Henry John Vincent
As you can see, the firstname-middlename(s) combos equal five syllables, which is, like, Master Class naming. Especially since they did it so well — such great names, all! And, as Amanda explained to me, each combo is full of saintly and family significance.
Names they’ve discussed for this baby boy include:
Sylvester (“my maternal grandfather’s name [and Vince’s top choice] … we really like Sylvester for the middle name and are pretty positive we want to use it there (unless there’s some nickname I’m not thinking of [other than Syl, Sly, and Slivy, which is what her grandfather went by] so that we could use it for a first name“)
Felix (“my top choice. St. Felix and the Spider is one of the books the kiddos received for Christmas, and I love the story … [but] there’s the reference to a cartoon cat… along with Sylvester the cartoon cat… I don’t really care – should that be an issue?!?“)
Declan (“It’s Irish, and I know it’s a saint’s name but I don’t know his story. I like it because it is different and I know no one by that name [but it’s] not as “soft” sounding as our other names… We don’t have any hard D or K sounds“)
Aidric (“Again, it’s an Irish saint’s name but I don’t know the story. Same with Declan on being different and obscure“)
Ivan ([Vince’s other top choice.] “I don’t know the saint story… I think it’s Russian, so it doesn’t go with our Irish/British thing, but it is regal sounding, like Elizabeth“)
And others that aren’t as serious as those listed above:
Linus
Louis
Milo
Silas
Levi
Otis
Finally, Amanda doesn’t want to repeat any names already used by family or close friends, which knocks off:
Gabriel
Augustine
Blaise
Kolbe
Xavier
Matthew
Michael
Isaac
Peter
Owen
Andrew
David
Jeffrey
Anthony
Caleb
Max
Wyatt
Timothy
Christopher
Nicholas
Joseph
Daniel
Samuel
John
Francis
Benjamin
Aaron
Zachary
Whew! Amanda concludes,
“Again, we really like Sylvester for the middle name and are pretty positive we want to use it there (unless there’s some nickname I’m not thinking of so that we could use it for a first name). Vince is almost sold on Felix, just can’t see it for a baby. We used to really like Raphael, but it goes over my 5-syllable limit if Sylvester is the middle name. We’re open to more suggestions but I think those five we have go well with Sylvester as the middle name. Which of them fit best with our other boys, or is there a better one out there we haven’t found yet?“
So first off, a couple thoughts about their current name list:
Sylvester is a NAME! Whoa! I’ve never known anyone considering it! Kudos to Amanda and Vince! Syl and Sly I’ve heard of, but not Slivy – that’s interesting! The only other nickname I came up with that might be doable is Sully. Maybe? I agree it’s a great middle name with the other names on their list, though it does lock them into a two-syllable name. Not that that’s a bad thing at all.
Felix is definitely getting a lot of love among Catholic families these days — I see it on people’s lists a lot, and there’s one Catholic family on the Baby Name Wizard forums that has three boys: Felix, Xavier, and Raphael. So it’s definitely out there, and at least among young Catholic families I don’t think the cartoon characters are an issue, like Amanda said. Although … even as I typed that and reread her Felix paragraph … Felix Sylvester … all of a sudden the two-character-names thing is really hitting me! I don’t know, I think it could go either way. Totally depends on who’s hearing the names. I think a deciding factor would be if it bothered Amanda and Vince if people pointed it out a lot after they’d already named the baby? What do you all think?
I personally love Declan. I know a few, including my cousin’s 2yo, and she’d chosen the name 15 years ago when she and I were in Ireland together and she heard it for the first time – that’s some name love! I actually didn’t know his story either, other than he was a saint, but because of Amanda’s email I looked him up, and while you can certainly get his basic story from Wikipedia and similar sites, I loved this one the best – it was written in 1914 and translated from the Irish (!); it has a long explain-y intro; and the main bulk of it is the life of St. Declan – he was preaching when St. Patrick arrived! And he seems quite beloved in Ardmore. It’s definitely an authentic Irish Catholic name!
Aidric I’d actually never heard of, but when I googled it, a post by Abby at Appellation Mountain came up – she does a great review of the name as both a saint’s name and a boy’s name in today’s America. I’m only seeing that he was French though, not Irish? Though it definitely sounds Irish, like a mashup of Aiden and Patrick.
Ivan, another WOW name! I think immediately of both Ivan the Great and Ivan the Terrible. It’s Russian for John, so when I googled it I saw references to both St. Ivan Rilski and St. John of Rila – same guy. It’s a cool way to honor a John, if you like heavy Russian names.
So of all those, I think Declan Sylvester is my favorite. It continues their Brit/Irish theme, and it’s got the right number of syllables, very handsome!
Okay! On to my suggestions – I can always come up with some! And holy cow – alllll the names that are off limits!! I think I did okay though – I always shoot for three suggestions, but came up with a couple more than that (they’re all two syllables, to go with the three-syllable Sylvester):
(1) Patrick
As far as I can tell, neither Patrick nor Brendan (below) has been used by someone in Amanda’s friends/family (fingers crossed!). I know they’re pretty basic as far as Irish-y boys’ names go, but I like them both with Sylvester, and there are some great nicknames for Patrick too: Patch and Packy are my faves, but I know a couple little Patricks who go by Paddy, which is beyond darling.
(2) Brendan or Brannoc(k)
St. Brendan is certainly a great Irish saint, and St. Brannock is a British/Celtic/Welsh saint as well — I like that Brannoc(k) has similar sounds as Brendan but is more offbeat/unusual.
(3) Ian or Ivo or Hugo (or Conrad!)
Ian and Ivo were inspired by Ivan, but I thought Ian especially fell within Amanda’s taste better. It’s a Scottish form of John (the Irish Sean doesn’t have enough syllables), and I like it with Sylvester. Ivo is definitely an offbeat choice, but it’s the name of several saints (more familiar under the forms Yves or Ives). It’s not an Irish or British name, but I believe it’s well used in England, which is why I thought it might work for this family. Then I thought of Hugh, but it doesn’t work because it’s only one syllable, but the variant Hugo is the perfect length. (My husband kind of loves this name, and really wanted me to suggest it to Amanda!) (Incidentally, two of the names we considered for our youngest were Hugo and Conrad – which reminded me immediately that Amanda shared that Vince’s middle name is Conrad – I’d be a big fan of adding Conrad to the list! Conrad Sylvester is so cool!)
(4) Robert nicked Rory
Finally, I thought of Rory, but it didn’t have a formal enough feel to me, to go with the other kids’ names. Robert might work though – St. Robert Bellarmine is great – and I’ve long thought Rory could be a nickname for Robert. Robert Sylvester is very handsome.
Those are my ideas! What do you all think? Amanda and Vince would love suggestions, so go ahead and fire away!
Spotlight on: Dominic
Today’s the feast of St. Dominic and I’m a Lay Dominican so it’s a ready-made name-spotlight day!
I LOVE the name Dominic. It is SO my style, SO Catholicky Catholic. Even behindthename knows it:
“From the Late Latin name Dominicus meaning “of the Lord”. This name was traditionally given to a child born on Sunday. Several saints have borne this name, including the 13th-century founder of the Dominican order of friars. It was in this saint’s honour that the name was first used in England, starting around the 13th century. It is primarily used by Catholics.”
I mean, come on. So awesome. It’s not for nothing that I chose it for one of my boys’ pseudonyms on here.
I admit that, growing up, I might have thought that it was too dark and latin-y for what I assumed my children would look like until I saw Kindergarten Cop and thought I would die over how cute the little Dominic was AND he looked just like what I thought my kids would look like (and a couple of them do!). So yes, it definitely works as well for a blondie as it does for anyone of Spanish descent (like the St. Dominic who inspired this post, de Guzman) or Italian descent (like St. Dominic Savio). Actor Dominic Monaghan (LOTR! Lost!) is a good example of a non-swarthy Dominic. (Actually, there are a couple actor Dominics who aren’t Latin — Dominic Purcell and Dominic West are two such, both of English and Irish descent.) (Also, FYI, Dominic West’s first three names are Dominic Gerard Francis. His children are Martha, Dora, Senan, Francis, and Rose. So fab. Name-wise he couldn’t get more Catholic if he tried.)
Another thing I loved, surprisingly, given my all-nicknames-all-the-time way, about KC‘s Dominic is that he went by the full Dominic, no nickname. I just really love the full name, it’s so handsome. But if you want a nickname, there are a few to choose from. Dom is the obvious, and I think it could be thought of as a half step away from Tom; my dad knew a Dominic growing up and they always called him Dommy, which also calls Tommy to mind. Nic(k)/Nicky is also a possibility (as is the spelling Dominick), or Nico, especially if you go with the super Italian Domenico. Domen is a Slovak form of Dominic and Dinko is a Croatian diminutive — I could see both having potential as nicknames (though Dinko’s appeal would likely be limited). Or there’s the Basque form Txomin. (Oh my.) (I believe it’s pronounced CHO-meen — anyone know any different?)
What do you all think of Dominic? Do you know any? What does he think of his name? Does he go by a nickname?
Happy feast day!!
ETA: This is a perfect place to link to the post I posted on FB the other day — check out these new Dominican Sisters’ beaauuutiful religious names!
Sophie the Giraffe is Catholic
You guys. You’ll never guess what I discovered just now. You know Sophie the Giraffe? That totally hip must-have teether? The one with its own Wiki page?
“It has achieved national icon status in France, according to Slate, with more sold each year (816,000 in 2010) than babies are born (796,000).
Sophie is also popular in the United States, where the toy has been available for decades and even appeared in the movie Three Men and a Baby (1987), and where it has become the best-selling baby product offered by Amazon.com. Launched in California in the trendy Hollywood area, it became popular through word of mouth, especially on Amazon.com since 2008. The reasons proposed for this success are that it is marketed as eco-friendly and a growing consumer mistrust of the security and health standards of products made in China since 2007.”
Yeah, that Sophie.
Guess who it was named after.
“Sophie the Giraffe, a French children’s toy, was named after Madeleine Sophie Barat because the first toy went into production on May 25, 1961, St. Sophie’s day.” (source)
Did you all know this?? Are you as amazed as I am?? I was literally just now doing a little research on St. Madeleine Sophie Barat when I came across this info. We’ve actually never had a Sophie — my oldest was born in 2004, four years before its popularity on Amazon took off, so it was never given to us and I never thought to buy it for my boys (despite the fact that everyone that I know with kids the ages of my youngers have one), but I’m kind of digging having a toy named after an awesome and awesomely-named saint! It’s definitely jumping up to the top of my must-give-to-new-moms list (along with the books of saints). So so cool.
Birth announcement: Mary Jane!
Do you all know the blog Catholic All Year? Kendra’s the blogger and she’s got a lot of good stuff to say, but I didn’t even realize until recently that she was nearly due with her eighth baby (I didn’t even know she’d had a seventh!) so clearly I haven’t been as faithful a reader as I thought I was.
I did a little digging and found some posts that discuss her kids’ names (they’re awesome — totally retro. Like Betty and Anita retro): the first six, number seven, and number eight — Mary Jane, who was born twelve days ago, and WOW what a birth story. (I first found out the good news on Kendra’s Instagram, where she’s graciously been posting daily baby pics because whooooo doesn’t love that?!)
Congratulations to the Tierney Family, and happy birthday Baby Mary Jane!!
Imaginary triplets
Charlotte at the blog To Harriet Louise (which is actually named after a name she loves for a future child!) posted in a really namey post yesterday (in which I got a shout-out! Woo!) her ideas for triplets, inspired by a forum on Nameberry (which I would link to except every time I’ve popped over there in the recent past I get a big scary “Viruses! Malware!” notice — anyone else? I’ve emailed them, they’re looking into it …).
Anyway, I loved Charlotte’s ideas (she used the archangels as inspiration, awesome!), and I thought it was a fun challenge, so I thought I’d give it a whirl here (for mixed-gender trips, they’re listed in fave order):
Girls
Faith Immaculata
Christiana Hope
Josefa Caritas
(nods to the Holy Family and the three theological virtues! Woo!)
(one of our readers has a daughter named Faith Immaculata 🙂 When I first heard it, I was blown away by its gorgeousness and significance, and I continue to be so)
(nicknames are difficult here … Faith doesn’t need one, but Faithy’s cute … I love Christiana and I love the idea of Christi being Latin for “of/belonging to Christ” — what are your best nicks for the Chris- names? Or maybe Ana instead? Josefa could be Josie, or maybe even Seffy? Sef? Or Fa? Hahaha jk!!) (I mean, just kidding about Fa — Seffy/Sef are kinda cute)
Boys
Joachim Patrick
Benedict Leo
Ambrose Edward
(just some of my fave heavy-hitting saintly boy names)
(nicks: Jake, Ben, and Sam, easy peasy)
How about you all? If you were naming triplets, what might you choose?
Couple fun things
I don’t know about you all, but I can’t stop crying about all the Planned Parenthood stuff — all those sweet babies — and on the one hand, I feel like it’s sort of disrespectful to think of fun, light things, like the only things we should be doing are everything we can to make it stop, but on the other, I personally don’t function well at all when I’m approaching the depths of despair, and I have a lot of people to take care of, so focusing on fun, light things is helpful. And I have a couple of them!
(1) I was sure I’d have some good name chats on my vacation, and I was right. My sisters-in-law know all sorts of people having babies, and some of the most interesting names I heard were:
— Benya (that spelling) (boy), said ben-EYE-ah. I’d seen Benia recently online for a couple (!) girls, which I’d thought was said BEN-yah, but then read that it was said ben-EYE-ah, so when my SIL told me about Benya I assumed it was for a girl, but no. I looked it up, and found this:
“Given Name BENAIAH
GENDER: MasculineUSAGE: BiblicalOTHER SCRIPTS: בְּנָיָהוּ (Ancient Hebrew)PRONOUNCED: bi-NIE-ə (English), bi-NAY-ə (English) [key]Meaning & HistoryFrom the Hebrew name בְּנָיָהוּ (Benayahu) meaning “YAHWEH has built”. This was the name of numerous Old Testament characters.
OTHER LANGUAGES: Benayahu (Biblical Hebrew)“
Do any of you know any more about this name, or know anyone (boy or girl) so named?
— Traigh (boy), said TRAY. I feel like I’m pretty up on Irish names, but I’d never heard this one! There wasn’t much to find on it, but I did find this:
“The name Traigh is a baby boy name.
Irish Meaning:
The name Traigh is an Irish baby name. In Irish the meaning of the name Traigh is: Strand.“
I don’t even know what’s meant by “strand”? Like strand of hair? Like to strand on the side of the road? I do love the sound and spelling. Do you know any Traighs?
— Olive (all the rage right now!), Walter (on a tiny baby! sooo cute!), Lennon (so hipster!), Joy (as a middle name, I love it!)
(2) I posted about my consultation for Marci and her husband back in May — her baby has arrived! Go take a look at that beautifully named baby girl! It’s an awesome post — lots of birth story info and lots of name info, since they didn’t decide on her name until the next day, and Marci said she was surprised by what they ended up with. (It’s lovely!)
(3) The feast of Sts. Anne and Joachim was the Sunday I was away, July 26. My mom took this picture for me in one of the churches she visited:
and I saw this and this online on the feast day also (from here and here, respectively). Beautiful! And I’ve heard from a few different readers that St. Anne has been powerfully interceding in their lives. What a blessing to have her as a patron saint!!
My boys have let me know that my time on the computer is up and they are “staaarving” so I’m off to make lunch — we’ll chat more tomorrow! 🙂 ❤
I would imagine Planned Parenthood fears names
I’d been composing this post in my head all morning, and when I sat down just now to write it, I logged into Twitter to access the link to an article I wanted to reference here, and saw that the fifth Planned Parenthood video has just been released (warning: graphic). I briefly skimmed the beginning of the article, stopping before I got to any graphic visuals, and yes, it’s truly awful, and I’m glad to join in the outrage in the way that a name blog can.
This was the article I logged into Twitter to get, which I’d retweeted the other day: The Difference a Name Makes by Molly Oshatz at First Things. An excerpt:
“It’s amazing the difference a name makes. On one day this past week, nearly a hundred endangered elephants were killed and around 3,000 abortions were performed in the United States alone, and we were unfazed—but the killing of Cecil the lion broke our hearts. He wasn’t just any random lion. He was Cecil. Mere lions (along with chickens, cows, lambs, and pigs) are killed, but Cecil was murdered. We love the lion that was named Cecil. We feel as though we knew him.”
I hadn’t given one thought to the idea that Cecil had made such huge headlines because he had a name (and all that a name implies) before reading this, but it makes sense. Knowing one’s name is what makes a person — or in this case, a lion — emerge from the nameless hoards as an individual. It’s like a sea of body-shaped gray-scale shades until names become known, and then faces emerge, detailed and clear and in color. It’s an individual marker for an individual, an entity separate from the crowd.
“The abortion industry knows very well the difference a name can make … “
This was certainly the reasoning behind this article posted at StudentsforLife.org, which I’d also referenced on my Instagram last week: Call Him Emmett. An excerpt:
“The little boy in the most recent undercover Planned Parenthood videos from the Center for Medical Progress has been referred to as “Eleven Six”, meaning that he was aborted at 11 weeks 6 days gestation. His tiny body parts are easily identifiable in the horrific videos as they are sorted in order to be sold.
This baby deserves a name, deserves dignity that is rightly afforded him as a member of the human race …
His name should be Emmett, after the boy of the same name who became the catalyst for the 1950s and 60s Civil Rights Movement.
Emmett Till was a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago who dared to speak to a white woman when he was visiting relatives in Mississippi. He was subsequently beaten with one eye gouged out, and then shot through the head before being tethered to a heavy gin and thrown in the river. His body was recovered three days later and returned to his mother in Chicago …
Rosa Parks even said she was inspired by the boy: “I thought of Emmett Till and I just couldn’t go back.”
This baby boy in the Center for Medical Progress is the Emmett Till of the pro-life movement.”
I thought Emmett seemed most appropriate for this baby. It made me think of the web site 50 Million Names, a “grassroots campaign to collect names for the now-more-than 50,000,000 children aborted in our country.” As it says,
“We ask Namers to register and then add names in a way that shows reverence for the lives of the aborted babies. Each name registration is accompanied by some concrete gesture made by the Namer in honor of this particular child.
Our hope is that these names will someday be read into state congressional records one by one, once each state’s million names are given. When all the names have been collected, perhaps the entire list could be read into the national congressional record.”
Because names are that important. How different it is to say, “These are the aborted babies: Daniel, Jayden, Marisa, Benjamin, Keisha, Trey, Moses, Ava, Chloe …” than to say, “Fifty million babies have been aborted.” (It’s actually closer to 60 million. God help us.) Even I, a lifelong ardently pro-life pro-lifer, get lulled into an almost settled unhappiness when faced with the abortion statistics (all numbers, of course) instead of the devastation and horror I should always have when presented with this information. But now, when I think of Emmett? I’m going to think of that one individual baby, and the gruesome specifics of his death, and the injustice and evil of it all.
Names have power. But more than that, being named=being loved and known and wanted, and that sense doesn’t come from nowhere. God tells us, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jeremiah 1:5) and, as we’re reminded at the end of the First Things article,
“… everyone is loved and named, even those whose parents don’t want them and can’t bear to love them, and whose lives the rest of us don’t deem worth living. Even before each and every one of us emerges from the womb and gains official “baby” status, we are already known, named, and loved; as in Isaiah 43:1, God says to us, “I have called you by name, and you are mine””
Baby name consultant: Saintly, different first initials, easy to spell
Caitlin and her husband are expecting their third little one, gender unknown (another green bean!). Their daughters are named:
Claire Camille
Margaret Joyce (called Maggie)
Beautiful names! Caitlin writes,
“Their middle names are our paternal grandmothers’ first names. We’d like to continue that tradition, so we have the following names left to work with:
Jacqueline
Shirley
Paul
Francis
William
WarrenWe’d like all of our children’s first names to be their patron saints. We gravitate towards classic English/Irish/Scottish names to tie in with our cultural heritage and our last name — Burch … We would like to do different first initials for everyone … And it has to be easy to spell.”
To give you a further idea of their taste, for boys Caitlin and her husband have considered:
James
Thomas
Henry
Patrick
Peter
George
Benedict
And for girls:
Alice
Beatrice
Helen(a)
Felicity
Jane
Julia
Agnes
Lots of names to work with! After much thinking and musing and taking to my Baby Name Wizard book for ideas, I came up with several ideas for each gender — I always shoot for three, but I had four for each that seemed so spot on to me that I couldn’t narrow it down any further:
Girls
(1) Alice
I was so excited to see that Caitlin and her husband had discussed Alice! It was the first one I had on the list I’d made for her as I was reading her email! I love Alice as a sister to Claire and Margaret/Maggie, and from their family names, I really like the idea of Pauline for Paul — Alice Pauline has such a lovely ring to it, I love it.
(2) Lydia
Lydia is one of my favorite names, and I was delighted to see it pop up in my research. I love that it looks short-ish like Claire but has the same number of syllables as Margaret. I quite like Lydia Shirley or Lydia Jacqueline or Lydia Frances (for Francis of course).
(3) Louisa (nicked Lucy?)
Both Louisa and Lucy seemed like good options for this family — luckily I don’t think they have to choose! Lucy is such a natural nickname for Louisa in my opinion. Louisa totally has the Brit feel of Claire and Margaret, and Lucy is spunky and sweet. Louisa Jacqueline? Louisa Pauline? Louisa Frances?
(4) Eleanor or Violet
Charlotte and Eleanor were names that seemed spot on as sisters for Claire and Margaret, but Charlotte repeats the C initial, and at the time I did this consultation for Caitlin I was still of the opinion that Eleanor is not a saint’s name (I’ve since revised my thinking — there’s a good argument that it can be considered to be related to Helen(a), which was on the list of names Caitlin and her husband have discussed). Both Charlotte and Eleanor pointed me to Violet, and as soon as I saw it I thought it would work well — it can be considered Marian, which is so awesome. I really like Eleanor Frances, Eleanor Pauline, Violet Shirley, Violet Pauline, and Violet Frances.
Boys
(1) Henry
Like with Alice, Henry was my #1 suggestion for Caitlin even before I read that it’s one of the names they’ve discussed! Woo! I love Henry, and it seems a smashing brother name for Claire and Margaret. I like it best as Henry William, and Henry Francis has a really nice flow to it, but it always makes me think of Betty’s second husband in Mad Men (Henry Francis). I learned recently though that I’m dating myself by being influenced by Mad Men, so maybe it’s a non issue? It’s very handsome!
(2) Samuel or Benjamin
Samuel and Sam (Sam!) are great great names and a perfect fit for a brother of Claire and Margaret/Maggie. I like Samuel Francis best, but Samuel Warren works too. And Benjamin has a similar feel to me, and is a bit closer to the feel of Claire and Margaret than is Benedict (from their list), in my opinion. Benjamin Paul is nice because Benjamin is so long and Paul so short; I like Benjamin Francis a lot too.
(3) Edward or Edmund
I love Sts. Edward the Confessor and Edmund Campion — how to choose?! Haha! They’re both British-y, and they both have really cute nickname options (Ed/Eddie, Ted/Teddy, Ned … my dad even had a friend named Edward who went by Zeb!). Edward Francis, Edward William, Edward Warren, Edmund Francis all sound great to me.
(4) Joseph
What else to say? Joseph is classic, masculine, saintly, just. Joseph Paul, Joseph William, and Joseph Warren all work well; I’m not including Joseph Francis because of the ph and F running into each other, but I don’t hate it.
Those are my ideas! What do you all think? What other ideas do you have for a brother or sister to Claire and Maggie?
A quick pop-in (& Laudato Si’ reflection at CatholicMom.com)
I hope you all had a great week! Our vacation is best explained by the fact that my boys are counting the days until we go back (we’re tentatively planning a similar trip in Summer 2017 so they have a lot of days to count). We actually did really great! And it was basically as I’d thought — we needed the same things for the week as we do for an overnight (pack and play, diapers and wipes galore, bathing suits, beach towels, sippy cups, clean clothes, paper/crayons, etc.), with the sole addition of a few more clothes and underwear.
I’ll be spending the next few days catching up on email, and I had some really fun name convos (thank you sisters and sisters-in-law and Mother dear!) and spotted some great names (a couple of which I posted about on Instagram), and encountered some sobering name info, all of which I’ll tell you about in upcoming posts. I’ll have a consultation posted tomorrow morning as usual, and some birth announcements to share as well. August is off and running!!
But my real reason for breaking my Sunday blog-fast and popping in here is to direct you to the CatholicMom.com Laudato Si’: A Community Conversation reflection on Chapter 3, which I’d mentioned recently. Every Sunday for eight weeks two CatholicMom.com writers will offer short reflections on their assigned chapter. This week is Chapter 3, and I have the privilege of being one of today’s writers. It’s not name-related, but I hope you’ll hop over there anyway, and maybe even leave a comment. Reading my one chapter — which is all that I’ve read of Laudato Si’ so far — was amazing; as I told friends, it was hard for me to imagine what Pope Francis could have possibly written about in the other chapters, so chock-full was Chapter 3.
Alrighty, I’m signing off until tomorrow!
Sancta Nomina 