By Any Other Name (Game?)

 I'm tired and my knee is really sore and I'm just going to phone this in by riffing on my comment on Julie's latest post. She asked if we had anybody famous in our family line.

We are supposedly related to the MacAskill giant, who was born in Scotland and moved to the east coast of Canada. The last name is spelled differently from ours, but, fun fact, my father's surname was misspelled on his birth certificate and is different from his parents'. I'm actually kind of glad, because I like the look of McC more. When I was little we had a can opener with him on it. I didn't name Angus after him, but my dad had said he would have named a boy Angus if they had had one. Then he was born and he was this big red squalling thing and seemed to really fit the name.

Matt's family has a tradition where the first male grandchild is named Robert. He himself is the first male grandchild, so his name is Robert Matthew. In university he lived across the hall from a guy named Mark with his same last name, and HIS real first name was Robert too, which I found hilarious. I didn't love the tradition (and it has been confusing as shit and ended up in big screw-ups in travel and at the pharmacy so I have been soundly vindicated), but 1) it was important to my husband and 2) it meant I got to pick Angus as the ACTUAL name.

People often commented positively on Angus's name (when we were at the doctor's office once and he was called in, this man said "Angus! I LOVE that name!" then glanced at his pregnant wife's expression and said "....but we're not going to use it" kind of glumly, which was hilarious. But I had no idea that apparently Angus Adams was an amazing baseball name. When he was in the Little League World Series and ended up on TSN, one newscaster said "Double A - I'm calling him Double A!" and someone reading the list of names said "Angus Adams - sick name!" So, they're welcome I guess? The Canadian finals were in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, near Cape Breton, so they day-tripped to see the statue. 

The whole concept of choosing your child's name is so crazy, when you think about it. You give birth to this whole new person and just randomly choose something to call it? And there's, like, an approved list, or you can choose to freestyle and open yourself up to a world of judgement (rightfully so, in many cases). I understand why it can be difficult for parents when a child wants to change their name for whatever reason, but it also makes complete sense that they should be able to choose a name that suits them better. Why should they have to keep this collection of sounds we applied to them when they were barely a person? 

Now I'm just rambling. Going to ice my knee and cry my way through the rest of the Andrea Gibson documentary.