Introducing

This is a couple weeks late, but I am an auntie in quadruplicate now. Declan Jack was born March 1. He is brother to Imogen Towriss.


Goddamn, he’s cute.

We don’t know what to do about the name though.

Immy’s full name is completely bonkers. Towriss is weird even as a last name (it’s my gran’s family name) and Imogen is a little heavy for a baby, but it was shortened very easily to Immy. The only problem with the name Immy is that when my sister Amy is also around it’s sometimes hard to tell who’s being chastised for playing with the buttons on the dishwasher.

Declan, however, is another story. Declan is a very nice name, but probably no one will call him that. Everyone will want to shorten it. But to what? Consensus is against Dec, because it looks too much like a calendar month. Several options have been floated so far: Dek, Deck, Dex are the three that come to mind, but I seem to remember at least one more.

Apparently, my brother doesn’t like Dex, which is my front-runner, because it sounds too much like something you put on the back of your house. I thought that was a very weird thing to say, considering that all of the options start with ‘d’ and have some kind of a hard ‘cuh’ sound to end them off. We’ll be hard pressed to escape the construction comparison. Dex at least gives him a wicked future DJ name too.

Maybe they’ll just call him Jack, which is the name of at least three of his great-grandfathers. Amy and David and I grew up in awe of our Poppa – Jack Butcher - who was an odd and amazing man. I’d be pretty happy if we had another Jack.