Zackary Stuart Shelden

Our son finally has a name: Zackary Stuart Shelden. It's taken us the entire pregnancy and the day after his birth to name him. I knew that I wanted Stuart as his middle name, after my Dad, and I had to get dibs on it since my sister is also pregnant and at the time I called it she didn't know what she was having. Luckily, she's having a girl so it didn't matter. The other names that were in the running were Jack, Wyatt, Cole, Adam, and Asher. It was going to be Cole for the longest time, but our friends Jen and Aaron had claimed that name and we felt bad taking it from them, especially since we know how hard it is to find a name. Jack was my favorite, even before we knew we were having a boy, but Todd's annoying habit of thinking of bad nicknames killed that one. "A" names were already out since his initials would spell a bad word, so that didn't leave us with much. Zackary had come up in the middle of the pregnancy but didn't quite stick at the time. We wanted a name that was different but not weird, strong, but also had a good meaning and couldn't have a bad nickname. I also liked the fact that Avery was our first child, so her name started with "A" and Zack is our last child, so his name started with "Z."

The day after Zack was born, Todd and I were trying to decide on the name. Todd somehow came back to Jack, and I still liked Wyatt, which Todd couldn't stand. After some discussion, I brought up Zackary again, and because it sounded similar to Jack but without bad nickname possibilities, that's the name we decided on. We decided on the spelling of his name so that it could be shortened to Zack, without the -ch (it just looks cooler!)

Anyway, my Dad said he was honored to have Zackary as his namesake, especially since he only had me and my sister, so no boys to pass along his name to. It's funny that it took us so long to find him the perfect name and we still call him "brudda."