The Naming Of Triplet's...

When I first told my friends that I was pregnant with triplets (late September was when we found out & they would be due late April if they had proven to be a singleton birth), they promptly decided that I was having a litter of kittens and one actually dared called dibs on the calico one.

The first question on everyone’s mind?  What are you going to name them?

Well, after finding out the gender of everybody in December, we set about trying to find the perfect names.

Of course this all brought to mind something written by T.S. Elliot that seemed appropriate at the time! “The naming of cats is a difficult matter, it just isn’t one of your holiday games; You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter when I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.”

Yes, ONLY ME...I know, I know...I had Elliot's “The Naming of Cats” running through the back of my mind constantly. I figured that I might as well be having a litter of kittens. After all, there are three babies in there!

I started out on the triplet connection forums trying to see what other people do when faced with such a daunting task. I learned that people actually decided to name their multiples using the defining letter given the baby during their ultrasounds.

They automatically assign a letter to identify each child:  for example, baby “A”, baby “B” and baby “C.” I was NOT going to be one of those people, so I immediately set out to search the internet of all baby name sites I could find.

At least if I find more than one name I like, I can use both! Not so fast, I found out. Now don’t get me wrong, I did have some idea where to start.

Naming my daughter was simple. My grandmother was always called “Baby Vivian” by her daddy because Vivian was also her mother’s name. I always liked the way her friends called her that even when she was well into her 60’s (Actually 'til her dying day & beyond.)

I decided I wanted my very own “Baby Vivian” as well. My husband found it cute too and we agreed to change the spelling to the French version to match my name, so “Vivienne” she became.

Besides, that was my favorite character from my current favorite musical, “Spamalot.” Being named after the Lady of the Lake shouldn’t be so bad!

Her middle name came easily as well. We decided to name her after my very great, Great, GREAT aunt (she was my mother’s great aunt so I’ve no absolute idea how many greats she should be to me!) Vivienne Emmalene she would become.

Now the boys, THEY would be the problem. You have to understand that I just simply do not like little boy names. I am not your Adam or John kind of girl.

In fact 12 years ago it took many trips to the bookstore before I finally found a few names that we could choose from for our yet to be first-born baby. I was nearly past my due date before the name "Bregon" even was a thought in our minds!

And to think, my husband had wanted to name him “George” after Lord Byron, which was NOT an option because I had named our cat “George” (As in I-should-love- him- &- squeeze- him-&- call- him- George from a Bugs Bunny cartoon!)

Now, I was faced with the challenge of having to come up with not 1 but 2 more sets of all new and perfect baby boy names. Everyone wanted to help, of course.

We thought of using my husband’s renaissance faire character name since I really liked that (I had thought it up of course.) However, naming a tiny infant “Tyberious” and naming a larger than life renaissance festival character that are two vastly different things.

I suggested that we could call him “Tye” which was at the top of the list for a while until a friend pointed out that it was all the rage to name baby boys Tyberious in Houston.

Besides, he had suggested not naming them after warlords in case they decided to grow literally into their names. Hmm…

Well, after watching many episodes of the multiple baby birthing shows on the Discovery channel, I stumbled across a very nice name that an English couple had named one of their children. It took me forever, it seemed, to find a spelling of it on the internet because I was going off of phonetics.

Then once I finally found it, I had to figure out how to Americanize it (Cian or Keane appeared to be screaming for someone to mispronounce.) So the list became Alexie, Kian, and Tye. I still wasn’t very happy with the list.

After much digging, and the idea that I was NOT going to remain pregnant forever while the babies waited around for me to find them names, I decided that we should use Kian and Kai.

Oddly enough, after watching the movie, “Son of the Mask” I had this odd notion that I should name one of the boys Loki after the god of mischief. My husband actually liked it (despite my obviously pregnancy-hormone induced state that convinced me this was a GREAT idea) so the smaller of the baby boys became Kian Loki.

Now I just had one more baby boy to name. Kai is from a book: “The Once and Future King” and is King Arthur’s brother. It means “Keeper of the Kingdom” according to the baby name site. I decided that he might not like being just Kai so I changed it to Kaiden in case it one day gave him grief.

His middle name, oddly enough came from a really silly movie called “Evil Dead.” Yes, I named that baby Ash. Well, I did spell it better and I even opted out of calling him Ashley as the movie states (and much to husband’s chagrin!)

Kaiden Ashe became officially our second triplet baby boy. Oddly enough, I could tell who was who & who was where in my tummy enough to inform the nurses exactly who would be named who just before their birth!

Originally published TUESDAY, MAY 8, 2007 BY MIMI RANKIN WEBB

http://mimirankinwebb.brandyourself.com/