Before we knew baby W was a "he" (that would be the day he was born), we already had names in mind for either gender. The female names were much easier, for some reason — we had those pretty well narrowed down. But for boy names, we were all over the map. One thing we eventually decided was that William would be one of the names. In Mexico, it's common to just have one name (no middle name), but we knew we wanted two names for our child, preferably one more Spanish and one more Anglo-ish.

So, William was in, which is not only my dad's name but was his dad's name, and his dad's name, and so on. I even saw a family tree once that had a Wilhelm and a Wilhelmina on there, married to each other. But the other name was harder to come up with. We didn't figure it out for sure until the baby was a week old! I felt like it was starting to get a bit ridiculous at that point.

In the delivery room, they were like, well, "what's his name?" And we were all, "ummm, William something. Or something William. We think." So he was labeled RN (recién nacido or "newborn"), which is kind of like the Mexican equivalent of baby boy name TBA. While we were still in the hospital a lady came by offering to help us get the birth certificate, and we were like, "yeah, let's do it! Wait, you need to know his name right? Shoot." And then of course in order to get him on our insurance plan they were like, "OK, all we need is his full name." So, in short, it seemed we needed to get the name thing figured out.

One name I liked a lot was Elías, which is the Spanish form of Elijah. I saw it in our bilingual Bible one day and just fell in love. This was months ago, and I started lobbying. But Fran was lukewarm on that. He was a big fan of Emiliano. I like the name, however, I thought Emiliano was a little overplayed (working at a school, I can spot those name trends). Then my brother-in-law pointed out that William Emiliano sounds slightly like "smell my butt" in Spanish, so that was that for Emiliano.

Finally we narrowed it down to two possible middle names: Elías and Alexander. Alexander I liked, but I felt like that made the whole name too Anglo. Nevertheless, it was Fran's pick versus my pick. We decided to let the baby decide. YES, that's right!

We wrote the names on little pieces of paper and let him grab one. (Thank God for newborns' grabbing reflex!) He grabbed Elías, so it was done.

You might wonder where we got this idea to let the baby decide. Well, that's how my husband got his own name! His parents offered him a bunch of pieces of paper and he grabbed the one that said Francisco. So maybe this is destined to be a family tradition... especially if indecisiveness is hereditary.