what's in a name

We had so many people ask us how we chose the name for our baby boy so I just thought I'd share with all of you also!

When it came to picking out names, I had a running list of baby name ideas on my phone since probably before we got married. If we were having a girl, we would have used a name that we've both loved since the day we got married. The boy name was giving us some problems though. I had several "cute" names listed, but none of them really stuck out to either one of us. A few months before I got pregnant (my most recent "baby fever" days), I was browsing the internet for boy names - again, because I felt we were destined to have a boy - and I came across the name Crew. I loved it. I thought for sure there was no way that Will would ever go for this name though. Will is a traditional kind of guy. He likes old-fashioned things. MUCH to my surprise, he loved the name too! I couldn't believe it. 

Ok, fast forward to becoming pregnant and the name game begins. We had to choose a middle name for our sweet Crew. The day that we told Will's family that we were pregnant, one of the first questions was, "Are you going to name him William?" At first we said no. (And kept saying no until two days before the party actually!)

Side note: I had been searching thebump and babycenter for name ideas and came across a message board that was discussing the name Crew. About 95% of everyone who commented said that it was an awful name and 'why would anyone ever name their kid that?' Usually something like this would have convinced me to instantly choose another name, but that just shows how much I still loved it. AND that message board was in 2009-2010....soooo 3 years ago!

Every middle name we came up with just didn't "flow" with Crew as the first name. It was so frustrating! There were a lot of names that sounded good with Crew as the middle name, but we didn't want that. We wanted him to have Crew as his first name and go by his first name. 

Last Thursday night, our ultrasound day, we were at dinner discussing names. We had already given Kelly the envelope with the gender in it so she was waiting on the name decision from us so she could prepare the name reveal chalkboard for the party too. We had been going back and forth a thousand times on whether or not we were going to use William or not. I asked Will if he wanted the baby's name to have William in it if he were a boy...and he said it didn't matter to him. Still getting nowhere with deciding, I asked him by approaching the question differently. "Say we have all boys one day, would it be important and meaningful to you that one of them has William in their name?" And he said yes. Finally! A decision has been made. That only took forever. Men.
And so his name would be Crew William Kassner. 

Side note #2: Before our gender reveal party on Saturday, I really regretted telling people that we were going to do the name reveal then too. I take things very personally and am so sensitive to what others are thinking so I was dreading revealing the name we had picked out. Crew is definitely not a "normal" name so I was scared that when we pulled the paper off the chalkboard that I would see people making faces at it. Actually, I don't think I even looked at all 60 of our friends and family standing there because I didn't want to see it if they made a face! Luckily, everyone was so supportive of our name choice. Whew!

I'll admit, I've never been one to care too much about carrying on family names, but something about thinking about our son and the meaningfulness of William in his name kind of makes me a little emotional! (Blame it on the hormones!) Of course, his daddy is a William...and if our baby gets just his daddy's character alone I will be so thankful. He's got a great role model to look up to!

But does the name William go past just my husband's name? Ohhh boy, does it!

First of all, my dad's first name is William...another great "William" for Crew to look up to!...and he's quite the jokester too!

My maternal great grandfather was Willie, or Dadaw as we called him! (If you remember, I got my tattoo in memory of my great grandmother, Willie's wife...aka Mamaw) So you already know I've got such an emotional connection thinking about Mamaw and Dadaw. 

Now onto Will's side of the family. 

(I'm mostly typing this out in case we ever lose the actual piece of paper with the family history on it...at least it'll be on the blog!)

William F. Baker, born 1789

interesting fact: William F. bought 800 acres of land in 1848 on what is now Lamar Ave. in Memphis

William Rufus Baker, (son) born sometime between 1810-1820

William Robert Baker, (nephew of William Rufus) born sometime between 1860-1865

William Franklin Baker, (grandson of William Robert) born 1918

William Elton Baker, (son of William Franklin; my husband's maternal grandfather) born 1941

William Elton, Jr., born 1964

William Stephen Kassner, (my husband; William E. Jr.'s nephew) born 1988

Crew William Kassner, coming 2013

Wow, that's over 2 centuries of William's in the family. Amazing!