What's in a name?

We've been asked several times about the name of the little guy: Jude Scott Kline Miller. There are two things we are asked most about, so I figured I'd just answer them both here. (By the way, we're still in the hospital and Kara and Jude are both napping but I just recently downed a Sobe Essential Energy drink so I'm not sleeping for a little while!).

Question 1... four names? Yes, we decided to go with two middle names. The main reason for this was the desire to incorporate Kara's maiden name, Kline, into our son's name. Kara comes from a long line of Klines, a very proud family, but in her particular branch of the family there are no more Kline men left who are likely to pass on the family name. Sure, I guess we could have simply decided to choose the singular middle name "Kline", but we had other goals for a middle name. We it up and found that there are no legal limitations on the number of names you can assign to a child, but we decided that four were plenty and picked up two middle names.

Question 2... where did "Jude" come from? Yes, I guess Jude is a fairly unusual name, but we chose it for several reasons. First, I have to tell you how we decided.

We started off going through one of those crazy-long baby names books (in our case 50,000 names!) and each picking a long list of names we liked. We had 43 total names on the first lists! Then, we made a game out of it... Kara deleted 5 names off my list, I deleted 5 off hers; Kara "protected" 5 names from elimination, I protected 5; Kara had to delete 5 off her own list, I deleted 5; etc. etc. etc. We ended the game portion of the naming with a list of 13 names. We slowly whittled down the list with mutual "yes, I could live without xyz" agreements, and finally narrowed it down to 2 names which we carried to the hospital. Each of the final two names had associated middle names.

We ultimately picked Jude Scott after taking a look at him in the hospital. We had "Jude" as one of our favorites because it is a name with a long history and meaning. It is the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew name "Judah", which means "praise". We certainly had a lot to praise God for after bringing us through the long desert of infertility treatments, and wanted to remind ourselves (and teach our son) about that fact. There is a short but poignant book of Bible written by a guy named Jude, too. Not a bad history. While there are some more recent cultural references, we hope there's not any insurmountable baggage from Paul McCartney songs or Jude Law (Benjamin Nelson gets the award for first person to quote from "Hey Jude"... we were wondering who the first would be!) .

We liked the sound of Jude Scott, and we also wanted to include "Scott" to go along with the Kline name. There are a long line of Scott and Simon Klines, including Kara' s father, and we wanted to include some of that family history in our son's name.

So that's what goes into a name! By the way, we are not telling what the other choice on the "going to the hospital with two names" list was. And Kara is the one who spotted Jude on her first reading through the baby names book and decided she liked it... needle in a haystack, that one.