Random thought

I was reading an article about baby names today & the article was mostly about parents having baby name regret. It talked a lot about how there are more options & more created names these days, which might sound good to parents at first but then turn out to be a bad idea. The article even mentioned that England in 1800, it took just 6 names to cover half the population. Now it’s over 500 names to cover half the US population. This got me thinking to how we’ve decided on Jacob’s name, & how articles like this make me like his name even more. We were definitely never going to go with a trendy name. In the list of names we considered, the one closest to being trendy was Jackson (we’d have called him Jack). But there are soooooo many little boys being named Jackson these days, we drifted away from that name. Jacob is a solid name. A traditional name, that goes back to the Bible. Either Jacob, or Jake, sounds good. So I think it’s a great, appropriate choice for our family. Now, I’ve always enjoyed calling people by a nickname when the opportunity presents itself, but I don’t know if I’ll adapt right away to calling him Jake, or if I’ll stick to Jacob & let others call him by Jake perhaps. I guess it kinda evolves with the family & funnels out to his friends later on. And, with my full name as Joshua, I wonder if my parents ever considered calling me Joshua, or went directly with Josh? 10 or 20 years from now, I wonder whether our son will commonly be referred to as Jacob or Jake, how that decision will develop, & which way he’ll prefer it?

--Josh