A couple of weeks ago, we welcomed the newest member of our family and officially became a family of 4! This is Caspian Paul, and just like I did with Emalyn, I wanted to use my first postpartum blog post to share how we came up with his name. : )
Peter and I had a few criteria (as well as some nice-to-haves) we wanted our son's name to meet, and for some reason, it was significantly harder to come up with his name than it was to come up with Emalyn's (has anyone else found that boy names are generally harder to come up with than girl names??). Because Emalyn has a unique name, we wanted to make sure he had a unique name too, one that wasn't too hard to pronounce or spell. It didn't need to be one we made up like hers though - that would've been too challenging, I think. We also thought it would be cool to use the name of a literary character from a fantasy novel. When Peter and I first started dating, one of the first things we bonded over was our love of books, so this seemed only fitting. It needed to be one that people would recognize without being too overt though (Peter always uses "Frodo" as an example of a literary character whose name we could never use because it's too obvious...not that I'd want to name my child Frodo even if it were more subtle lol). And since Emalyn's name was the combination of two family names, we thought it would be nice to incorporate a family name into our son's name as well.
As we thought through names from fantasy novels that we're both fond of, we started thinking about how cool it would be to make a small tribute to C. S. Lewis with our son's name. This is because his writings have had a significant impact on us both in terms of our faith. In fact, we considered naming him Lewis for that specific reason. We ended up settling on Caspian because it met the desire to recognize Lewis while also using the name of a fantastical literary character from a book series we both like. For those of you who don't see the connection, Prince Caspian is the fourth book in Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia series and is the name of a character who is first introduced in that book but who also appears in the books that follow. It is actually believed that Lewis referenced the Caspian Sea with this character's name, and Peter and I thought it was cool that both of our kids' names reference bodies of water (Emalyn means "whole lake"). I figured other Christians would be fairly familiar with the name, but I've been pleasantly surprised by how many others know the name/series as well! I guess it helps that it was one of the few books from the series that was turned into a movie.
We also liked the idea of incorporating a biblical name into Caspian's name. While Emalyn's name doesn't include a biblical name per se, her middle name is Faith, which still has a natural connection to Christianity. We thought it only fitting for Caspian's name to do the same. Paul was an important figure in Christian history, and his letters in the Bible have both encouraged and challenged us in many positive ways, which is a big reason why we chose that as Caspian's middle name. However, it's also a family name. It is the middle name of both my father-in-law and one of my brothers-in-law, so we thought we'd continue the legacy. As an added bonus, Paul is the name of the main character in Dune, which I finally finished reading earlier this year after Peter and I watched Part 1 in theaters last year (it's a really good sci-fi book, and it was cool seeing the many ways in which it inspired Star Wars!).
As tired as I am (and that's just due to lack of sleep from needing to nurse Caspian every couple of hours), I truly feel ecstatic and blessed that he's finally here! And Emalyn has adjusted to having a younger brother even better than we could have anticipated. Thank you to those of you who have checked in, fed us, and prayed for us. Caspian is doing well, and I'm amazingly almost fully recovered! I look forward to sharing his birth story in my next post! : )
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