Introducing Arthur Stanley!

Baby Arlo was born Sunday, May 30 at 7:08 am, weighing in at 8 pounds, 15 ounces, and measuring 22.5 inches long. Everybody is doing great; I ended up having a C-section (more on that later), so we're at the hospital for a few more days while I recuperate. I'll come back and tell you more once we've had some time to get to know this little guy!

Here's a little more about his name, since I always like reading about how people chose their baby's name. (I wrote this about a week ago, so I could just copy and paste it when it was time for the big announcement!)

We ended up giving the baby a double-grandpa name--Arthur is from Patrick's grandpa, and Stanley is from mine. I love that we ended up using family names, but we didn't choose the names just because of that (although it would have been much easier if we'd just limited ourselves to different combinations of grandpa names from the start!). Arthur was the only name that was on both of our lists, and Patrick came up with Stanley on his own before remembering that it was my grandpa's name. When we were out at dinner a few months ago, Patrick suggested Stanley as a middle name for Arthur, and I really liked the combination.

As a bonus, naming the baby Arthur also lets me use Arlo (one of the other top names from my list) as a nickname. It's not a traditional nickname for Arthur, but I think it's close enough that it's not too much of a stretch. Hopefully once we get to know the baby better, it will become obvious whether he's an Arlo or an Arthur or something else entirely!

As far as the last name goes, we went the standard route and gave the baby Patrick's last name (I kept my name when we got married). Pre-baby, I'd suggested combining our last names to come up with a new family name, but that idea never really took off, which is fine with me. I think people are used to moms and kids having different last names at this point.