Carl Jr.

I was just on the phone with Delta, linking our many itineraries together for our upcoming US travels in June, and the Delta representative kept referring to Simon as Carl Jr. It was so weird! Who is Carl? The name just doesn't ring true to my son, or my husband. Yet we did end up naming our son after Martin....

Confused yet? Martin and Simon both have many names. But in both cases, their first name is Carl. As Martin discovered in post-911 US, it's really inconvenient to go by one name, when your actual official name is another. This leads to all sorts of confusion on documents and registration forms. It used to not be such a big deal - Martin could just be Martin. But no longer.

And somehow we ended up naming Simon Carl as well. We had narrowed down our list of names pretty quickly (or rather we didn't have a long list of names due to his early arrival). I really like Carl because of the nickname Calle/Kalle, which is common in Scandanavia. We had always liked the name Simon, and Martin, Martin's brother, and Martin's father all have Simon in their names. But we decided against Calle/Kalle (after my mom said it in this really American way that kind of killed my buzz), but we kept Carl and Simon and Jack (my grandfather's name).

Discussing names in the hospital

Trying out a few different combinations and spelling options.

And now we don't really know why we did it. Kept the Carl, that is. As evidenced by my recent Delta conversation (or visits to a new doctor) they think my son's name is Carl but it's not (but it is). We didn't mean to name him after Martin, we even feel a little silly about that (Carl Jr!). Martin keeps saying we're going to change his name (drop the Carl). Ha! Try dealing with three separate countries that already have his name on file as Carl Simon Jack. No thanks. But no matter. He's our Simon.