What's in a Name? Part II

When we named Gabrielle it was all a bit unreal, especially to me, but I don't remember it being all that difficult. I was pretty much locked on Tennessee from the instant that Belinda uttered it in a brain-storming session, and I also wanted badly to include Maxwell as I didn't want miss my chance to continue the tradition, so in the end she was only a few days old when we finally settled on all her names and their order. But when it came time to do it all again, I think we both found it much harder. I was adamant that he couldn't have fewer names and that the same principles should apply, but maybe since he was already Isaac to us (see below) we didn't feel any urgency to settle on the other names until we felt like the government was going to start hassling us to register him. And then we got it wrong.

Brooklyn

We stayed with the place-name thing, but traded American states for cities. When Belinda and I were in the middle of our overlapping parental leave with Gabrielle we spent a week in New York City, staying in an apartment in Brooklyn. We stayed in a neighbourhood that I would normally be terrified to walk through at night but since we walked everywhere with Gabrielle in a backpack I felt perfectly fine: "Who would mug someone with a baby in a backpack?"

Isaac

Isaac was the front-runner for boys names by a mile when Belinda was pregnant the first time. Nothing was even close as I recall, so as soon as we learned he was a boy (Belinda got her way the second time, finding out the baby's gender during the ultrasound) we immediately started to refer to him as Isaac and that was that.

Ziv

Belinda's cousin Ziv, a strapping young man and former paratrooper in the Israeli army and the father two young children, was struck and killed by a car while riding his bicycle. I campaigned strongly for the symmetry with Maxwell but I also must shoulder most of the blame for the initial Zion version of that honour. But it's fixed now, and we both feel much better.

Peres

Belinda's last name.

Draper

Mark's last name.