On names

I thought I might say a bit more about Alice's name. Having chosen Edith's name in a last-minute change of direction the morning after she was born, we never expected to settle on our second child's name well in advance. In 2005 we went to the hospital with a list of four possible first names and wound up using none of them. We expected a similarly protracted process this time.

But during one name-pondering session back in July we tried out Alice, and to our surprise it stuck with both of us for the duration. In fact, it bumped virtually all other options off the list, and we went to the hospital with no other frontrunners--though we agreed to give the new baby a chance to express her personality before settling, allowing her several hours in which to show she wasn't an Alice.

In the intervening months, we'd had a number of interesting coincidences around the name. The first time we mulled it over was our anniversary, when Edith was staying with some friends of ours for the evening so we could go out. When we went to pick her up from their condo, which they'd decorated with antique books, we saw that the book closest to the door was titled Alice and Edith.

Then over Thanksgiving Tom ran into a friend from seminary and her parents, in town visiting for the holiday. "How is Alice?" asked the friend's mother. "Um...Edith?" Tom asked. The mother apologized and said yes, she'd meant Edith, she'd forgotten our daughter's name. Tom told her that she actually might have anticipated our other daughter's name.

Finally, a few nights before Alice was born, we were eating in a campus dining hall wondering when I was ever going to go into labor and talking about the relative virtues of that night. Suddenly a table full of students behind us started singing "Happy Birthday." They sang to...an Alice.

Most blog readers will know that Opal is for my grandmother, who passed away almost a year to the day before Alice's birth. She would have loved to cuddle a second great-grandchild.

On Tamsin, the name most throwing people for a loop: We could have stopped with Alice Opal, but since Edith has three names we were concerned that some day this child would feel slighted if she had fewer (something a few friends in that position told us they'd felt growing up). Plus she can go by the always distinguished X. Y. Thirdname Lastname format when she becomes a writer someday. We wound up choosing Tamsin as an evocation of Tom's name and also because we liked it on its own merits. It was striking, too, that in two of the popular books on baby naming trends, Edith, May, Alice, and Tamsin were all described as classic names that are popular in Britain but less so in the States but that have strong potential for resurgence on this side of the pond. Who knew we were so true to a type?

A few shots of A. O. Tamsin Lank and her dad: