Sparty! How’s everything going? I hope you are enjoying yourself wherever we are at this point in time and whatever age you are.
Today I am going to get straight to the point of this particular post. I am sure you have been wondering for a while now why on earth these are addressed to Sparty when you are clearly not called Sparty. Well, the short answer would be that Sparty is a nickname, but I suppose in the interest of clarity and in the service of storytelling, we should probably go into the long answer. In hindsight, this should have been one of the first posts, but better late than never, right? *sheepish grin*
Basically, the first time we saw you in a scan you were about 12 weeks old and although you were super-cute (see Note #3) it was too early to tell if you were a boy or a girl. A couple of months later, at about 20 weeks, you were big enough, but at some point around 17-18 weeks your mum and dad decided we were going to wait until after you arrived to find out.
So here we are, at about 33 weeks and it is still a surprise! Are you surprised to hear this? Aha, so lots of surprising surprises all around then. Good, good.
Now that we have covered the surprise element, let’s talk about the name itself. Sparty is essentially a gender-neutral derivation of the Greek word Spartacus, which was the name of a famous gladiator who kicked some serious butt many hundreds of years ago.
The original idea for the name came from me because I took the task of looking for unique and uncommon names very seriously and I certainly hadn’t met anyone named Spartacus. But then, for reasons that are still somewhat unclear to me, it was mutually decided that this was not at all suitable as an 'official' name.
Of course, the fact that there was a 50 per cent chance that you were a girl made the name even more unsuitable and so your sensible mum came up with the name Sparty. And since we are going to have to stick with gender-neutral for a little bit longer, it made sense to keep addressing these posts to Sparty.
Needless to say, there’s a high likelihood that because we have both become used to the name, we might keep using it for you as a nickname, but only if you like it. If you don’t, that’s fine, it will just be confined to this blog and you can come here every once in a while and be reminded of your little epic Greek alter-ego :)
So now that you know the origins of Sparty, let’s get to the official names. By the time you are reading this, you will be named one of the two names we came up with. (obviously, we needed one boy’s name and one girl’s name) Both of us put a lot of thought into picking the names because we wanted one that would fit just right.
You might think that’s quite a lot of pressure on one word, and actually you are right. While it’s true that a name is very important, it’s also true that you will never be summed up, described or defined by it. It’s also highly unlikely that a name has any real predictive powers; for example if we did go with Spartacus it wouldn’t somehow increase the likelihood of you turning into some sort of warrior, you might be just as likely to become a painter or a pilot.
Then again, there are only a certain number of words that work as names. It's not like I could call you jackfruit just because I happen to like jackfruit a lot. And so it is tempting to name children after famous men and women. But then I was thinking who were these famous people named after? What was the reason for Spartacus’s mother naming him that? And did he make the name famous or was he maybe somehow destined to be famous because of his epic-sounding name?
These are important questions, but I will not dwell on them any longer because you are probably already a little bored and it is most likely past your bedtime.
To conclude, there are only two things I wanted to tell you through this post. First, I hope you like the name we picked for you. And second, I hope you will be the best you can be, at whatever you choose to do. That way, whatever it is your parents named you (or, in the case of Spartacus, almost named you) you will end up just making a name for yourself anyway. And that, little Sparty, will be the greatest name of all.
Love, Your dad
Sparty! It’s been a few weeks since I wrote anything to you, and we are now just a few weeks away from your arrival! Needless to say, both your mum and I are super-excited and we are slowly working on getting things ready to make your first few days and weeks as comfortable as possible.
I hope things are ok inside; we have been told that you now have eyebrows and can also open your eyes to check out your surroundings. It’s probably also getting a little cramped in there, which is one of the reasons we can feel you every time you do a little stretch or baby cartwheel.
Here on the outside, summer has now made way for autumn, and this means that the days are slowly getting shorter, the leaves are changing colour, and the thicker coats are slowly being dragged out from the back of the cupboard.
When you arrive it’s going to be almost the start of winter, but as much as we are tropical and don’t really hang out and go to the movies with Miss Winter (I've always found her a little frosty- maybe its a personality thing), this one is going to be awesome for many reasons.
First of all, it will be our first winter with you around and that warms my cold little heart already. Also, it’s going to be our first winter in Amsterdam, this beautiful city that we currently call home. And of course a few short weeks after you arrive it will be Christmas.
You will probably see lots of photos of yourself in festive gear in due course, but for now just know that this Christmas in particular, the fairy lights will seem just that little bit brighter as we celebrate both your arrival and the birth of another very special baby two thousand years ago.
Speaking of festivities, a few weeks ago it was Onam. Again, you will find out more about this soon, but this is a harvest festival that is celebrated in Kerala and is the one time people all over this magical, diverse state come together to celebrate as one.
Of course, celebrating anywhere outside of Kerala isn’t quite the same as actually being there, but your mum made some flower arrangements- see pic. (when you read this, come and ask us what ‘athappu’ is) and we went to a restaurant to have some South Indian food so we did our best to get in the festive spirit :)
It feels like lots more has happened in the weeks between now and my last post, but I’m going to stop now because I have some more preparation to do.
I am coming to terms with the fact that writing is going to be harder from now on because as the day approaches I feel like I have more to say, but then it also means that I have less time to do everything else.
So I’m sorry if these posts seem more rushed and haphazard than usual, but it’s only because I’m dazzled to distraction by the sheer mind-exploding excitement of it all.
Love, Your dad
Dear Sparty, I have written about this before elsewhere on this blog, but the following is a passage from Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot". He was inspired by the photo you see below of our planet, taken by the the NASA Voyager Project from a vantage point 3.7 billion miles away.
I am reproducing it here because I think it fits in nicely with the theme of the last post I wrote to you, and is way better than anything I could come up with myself. I hope you enjoy it. Love, your Dad.
“Consider again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilisation, ever king and peasant, every young couple in love, every moth and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar,” every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturing, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
