how jack got his name

It wasn't an easy task, my friends. Here's how it all went down...

One of the names on the table when we were brainstorming was James Andrew. When I realized that his initials would be JAC, I thought it might be cute if we called him Jack for short. But after much deliberation, we decided that we didn't want to call him anything other than his first name - no middle names, no nicknames. I go by my middle name and it's been annoying since the first day of kindergarten. And I don't want to pass that onto my children.

The problem was that we had kind of fallen in love with the name Jack. And we even picked out a middle name to go with it: Wilson. That's Andrew's middle name, as well as his dad's.

But Andrew, being all sentimental and a traditionalist and blahblahblah, wanted his name to mean something. So back to the drawing board we went, although I was already subconsciously thinking of my son as Jack.

Aside: as much as I give him a hard time about the whole name thing, I actually love how Andrew wants our kids' names to have a story. He's not a terribly sentimental man, so I know that must mean a lot to him.

One day, I suggested that we think of authors or other people who have influenced us in some way to see if we could get anywhere with that. That's when we discovered that CS Lewis' name is Clive Staples. Not gonna happen. We love CS Lewis, especially Andrew. I think Mere Christianity is the book that led him to call his faith his own, rather than let it remain rooted in tradition and routine. It answered a lot of the questions he had and in a language that he could understand. To give our son a name that gave nod to all of that would be ideal.

But it's not going to be Clive and it's not going to be Staples.

After that conversation, I had CS Lewis on the brain and decided to read a little bit about him. And that's when I found this:

At the age of four, shortly after his dog Jacksie was killed by a car, he announced that his name was now Jacksie. At first he would answer to no other name, but later accepted Jack, the name by which he was known to friends and family for the rest of his life.

We could name him after CS Lewis after all.

Andrew still wanted to think it over, but one night he said, "You know what? I think our son's name is Jack." And then I cried.

Jack Wilson Castrodale. It was him all along.