Notes to Sparty #9

 
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