"Have you picked a name yet?"

"Have you picked a name yet?" is a popular question now that we know a little boy bun is in the oven and usually the 2nd question is "Are you planning to share it?" The answers are, yes, we've picked and name and, yes, we plan to share it. I realize many people choose not to share and I can understand why - the last thing you want to see is a weird face on someone or hear the opinion of someone after you announce the name you've chosen for your baby. I figure those things will happen if you announce it now or after the arrival, plus I'm just really bad at keeping secrets!

So, if you haven't heard already, "Colton Earl Meade" is the name we've chosen for our little guy. "How did you come up with this name?” you ask.

I will start with "Earl". "Earl" is Chad's middle name and the name of his maternal grandfather and a name that we knew we would pass onto a son if we had one. Chad would actually love to have "Earl" as the first name, but I just felt I would have a hard time calling my cute little baby "Earl" after the Dixie Chicks' song among other things so we agreed we would keep it as a middle name.

The first name was much more difficult. We decided not to make our son a Jr. or II because we couldn't come up with a good name other than "Chad" to call him and having two Chads is just confusing and inevitably one would be "Big Chad" and one "Little Chad". I've always had some ideas of little boy names that I like but Chad strongly disagreed with all of them. He claimed that they were too sissy and that our son would get beat up on the playground. So, I spent one evening going through a baby name book that a friend had given me and that's when I found "Colton" which means "coal town". When Chad came home that evening and I told him he loved it. Since Chad and I are both from small coal mining towns in Southwest Virginia and from families of coal miners, we thought it was a strong name with meaning from our roots. The day we found out we were having a boy we decided to test drive it for a while and make sure we liked it...now after 6 weeks of calling him "Colton" we can't imagine calling him anything else.

Some who have heard the name "Colton" have asked if we will call him "Cole" or "Colt" and as of now we are not planning to shorten it. I figure in school or through family he will gradually end up with nicknames so we plan to call him "Colton".

By the way, we had two beautiful girl names picked out that would have been hard to choose between so maybe next time we can use one of them!

Also, I had my 24/25 week doctor's appt yesterday and everything is going great. Less than 15 weeks to go!