Considering Solly’s birthday just happened, this seems like an appropriate time to share the story of how we named him! For some reason, its taking a lot out of me to share this one. We pour HARD over our kids names, and I hate to put out there that I’m not happy with him. I AM! TRULY! So please, nothing but love.
*****
I feel like I have to be careful with how I tell the story of Solomon’s name. Please take the obvious things with a grain of salt. The reality is that “Solomon” was not my first choice. It wasn’t my second, either. I LOVE his name, it suits him SO well, and I wouldn’t change it. But, at the time, it felt like we had to settle by choosing his name.
When we found out we were having another boy, we were stumped for names! Rowan’s name had been hard enough to nail down, and now we had to figure out yet another boys name! Does anyone else agree that boys are SO hard to name??
We toyed with a few names that we kiiiiinda sorta liked, but nothing stood out as an actual contender. We had tossed around Sullivan a number of times, but for a handful of reasons, we knew we couldn’t have a Sully. WE liked Sully, but we knew some important people didn’t, and we couldn’t use it. It wasn’t long after we vetoed Sullivan that I got “Sam” into my head. I loved the idea of having a Sam, but I wanted to go in a different direction than Samuel. When “Sampson” came to mind, I was SOLD. I LOVED that name! It felt like everything we strived for when naming children. A good name for a baby, a kid, a teen, and an adult. A soft name, but a strong name. It was perfect. I was instantly attached to it. That was it. That was my sons name.
Except that, for my own personal reasons, I knew we couldn’t do that :/ Not everything needs to be on the internet, but I knew we couldn’t have a Sampson. We all have different name associations that play into names we like and dislike, and I knew it would just grind away at me. I was pretty devastated. Because there went my dream of having a Sam. I’m still a little sad about it, if I’m being honest.
I’m not sure how Solomon actually came to mind, but I understood right away why I liked it. It sounded a lot like Sullivan, but maybe a little softer? I’m not sure. We knew we were on the right track with it, but we considered for a long time whether to name him Solomon, or just Saul. At the time, thats what I figured we’d call him. We had never named a kid something while intending to exclusively call them something else. But as I mentioned in Rowan’s post, we have intentionally not chosen one syllable names for our children. While we obviously ended up settling on Solomon, we had every intention to only ever really call him Sol.
And then he was born, and he was Solly. It was perfect.
His middle name was SO hard to nail down! Neither Brady nor I felt strongly about naming our children after ourselves. So our names never showed up on our lists of possibilities for baby names. I remember pairing Solomon with “Brady” in my head one day and just simply knowing that this was going to be it. But I knew Brady wouldn’t like it at first. I prepared myself, and presented him with the idea that night while soaking in a hot tub. As predicted, it was met with a “Yaaaa…I don’t know…” but I asked him to just mull it for a bit, or even just forget it, but don’t veto it completely. Obviously, we did end up deciding on Brady’s name as Solly’s middle name, but Brady was never fully excitedly sold on it. He knew it was the right fit, it was PERFECT, but it went against his grain to name a kid after himself. Still, I’m pretty confident he wouldn’t change it 🙂 Its exactly right. And how perfect is it that Solomon ended up being the kid that looked so much like Brady?! Talk about an appropriate namesake!
A handful of people in his life (Rowan included) have dubbed him as Sol, which makes my heart pretty happy, honestly. The kids also alternate between Solly and Solomon, too, and I also love that, because he’s growing up knowing both. We don’t just love calling him Solly, but we love his real name, too. He also answers to Wolly, Wolomon, and far too many other names. He loves calling himself Solly Wolly 🙂
I’m SO happy with the name we ended up with, even though it felt like a second or even third choice at the time. It all boils down to this. Solomon’s name is PERFECT for exactly the boy he is!