Naming Baby Peter

He makes the goofiest faces!

 {This is a non-redacted revision of my baby names post. A couple of people mentioned rereading that one when Peter had arrived, based on my vague terrible name redaction techniques.}

The beginning of the post. . . Naming Peter (still getting used to using his real name here!) has been much more interesting. At the beginning of pregnancy, we had first names picked out. The beloved and leftover girl name from naming Clare, and Peter, the unused boy name from the same.

Then we started talking middle names and things got interesting. The girl name never changed, and after lots of hemming and hawing and debating we settled on a middle name we'd have probably stuck with had Peter been a Little Miss. If we had had a delivery room surprise, it's probably the name we'd have gone with!

The boy name on the other hand . . . Charles had his heart set on using a particular middle name. I, however, don't like the way it sounds with Peter. The way the name sounds is important to me. I have to be able to yell it across the house/yard/playground. I have to be able to imagine a priest saying, "________________________, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." I have to imagine that slow, loud proclamation at graduation. There were lots of things wonderful about the middle name, but the sound with Peter was not going to cut it for me. I suggested changing the first name in order to use the middle name.

We discussed. We debated. We finally decided to table it until we knew whether we even needed to select a boy name.

Sure enough, we've got a little boy. Driving home from the ultrasound, we didn't make it out of the parking lot before we started talking. We decided together that keeping Peter was more important than a middle name. So, we set out to decide on a middle name we could both agree with. We tentatively decided on Damien, but still didn't feel like we could say with 100% confidence, "His middle name is Damien." It is not the middle name we had chosen when I was pregnant with Clare. Anthony was never ruled out entirely, but we slowly decided that Damien was right and stuck with it. :) [For the record, we made the final, final, final decision as we were filling out the birth certificate paperwork, so I mean it when we say that we were slow to feel set on it. Now, though, we are thrilled and agree that it is the perfect name for our little guy!]

So, we ended up with our sweet little Peter Damien. Peter was chosen for St. Peter (Apostle, first Pope, precocious thrice-denier of Jesus raised to glory thanks to His Mercy), and Damien for St. Damien of Molokai (who died of the leprosy contracted serving the Hawaiian leper colony). We pray that he may walk his own path to holiness and live a life pleasing to God.