Behind the name...

We welcomed our son early this morning at 5:28 am. Photos and stories to come later in the day.
He is beautiful and improving in health with every moment. Jonathan and I are resting now, and Grandma Mauss is in the nursery with him.

In the meantime, a little about his birth name.

The road to naming Baby Ski was not an easy journey.

Take two incredibly stubborn people who are always right, a lifelong decision, and a wee little one who has to deal with the name throughout his lifetime...and you have the makings of an eight month long ongoing debate.

When all was said and done...we decided to honor both of our fathers by giving Baby Ski a name that shared their first names. The process of building these two pages actually took me several weeks, because each time I started working on them, it made me cry.

One of the nights that Jonathan was working on cleaning out the baby's room, he found an old box of projects that Mary had saved for him, from second and third grade. All kinds of topics - from classmates to classes to summer vacation to his teachers - you could tell which teachers he liked (they were always happy and had big smiley faces in his drawings of them) and which ones he didn't (they were swallowed by dragons and disappeared).

The night we found this particular project that Jonathan made was the day after we decided on Baby Ski's name.

The project was in his own eight-year-old handwriting, of how he came to be named. I scanned in his penciled penmanship, and transferred it to the page via Photoshop. The pages were nearly twenty years old. In his original project, there was also a list tracing his Sprouffske genealogy nearly 200 years. How sweet is that?

On the second page, I added a photo of him, his dad, and his grandpa Fred. It's from right around the time he finished his name project...and it brought it all together.

Welcome to the world, little Thomas Lawrence.