TheCalabrias.com

Today “Little Baby Junior” reached 28 weeks — 7 months. Amazing! And I’m still very glad (and thankful) to report that both Ashley and baby are doing quite well.

As you know, HE will be here before we know it. So we have been busy turning the existing play room back into a nursery. We brought the crib down from the attic; we setup the dresser and changing table; and the kids helped me prime the baby room’s walls in preparation for the next baby room design. (Ashley did a great job on both Lorenzo’s and Chloe’s.) We also brought Lorenzo and Chloe to IKEA and Babies’R'US a couple of weeks ago, and they had a blast helping us pick crib sheets, receiving blankets, bibs, stuffed animals, baby bottles, etc, etc…Fun! (I will post pictures once it is done.)

Nonetheless, we still have not decided on a name. And I must say, I’m very anxious to start calling him something other than “Little Baby Jr” and to start bonding on a more personal level. Of all the names we checked, Lorenzo and Chloe first suggested that we should call him, Leonardo Massimo Calabria. It certainly has a nice “ring” to it. But what I really like is the way they came up with the name. They both know that we chose Lorenzo’s name because of Lorenzo de Medici’s influence on Italian art; and following that same train of thought, they came up with Leonardo because Leonardo da Vinci was one of the greatest Masters of the Medici court. (I wonder if the minor suggestion to a pecking order is just my imagination? Impressive nonetheless!) However, I’m afraid he will probably end up being called Leo, which I’m not too crazy about, and Ashley finds Leonardo to be a bit too close to Lorenzo.

More recently, while looking for Italian names online, we came across Paolo Uccello — another Italian painter who created some pioneering work on visual perspective. Appropriately, at the age of ten (the age difference between Lorenzo and the new baby), Paolo became apprenticed to the famous sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti. So, since Leonardo was getting some resistence, the kids are now pulling for Paolo Massimo Calabria.

The middle name Massimo is just a “cool” Italian name. I guess it stuck when I told them that in Brazil, when we say someone is “o massimo”, it means he/she is really cool.

Leonardo, Paolo, Massimo, Marco, Cristiano, Francesco, Rafael…we will see.