Ask For Her By Name
(Turner here, posting disguised as Ash while Ash tries to coax our dear daughter into slurping down a full meal.)
We've got a name. Or, rather, our daughter has a name, which we selected:
Sloane Lantau Bristowe Turner
Okay, yes, we know it sounds a bit like Calgary's leading law firm ("Here at Sloane, Lantau, Bristowe & Turner, we understand the unique legal issues facing the modern oil & gas industry"). But we like it and we don't care. Plus she'll go by Sloane Turner (or Sloane L. B. Turner or Sloane L. Bristowe Turner) most of the time, which all sound considerably less like she'll have that brief ready for you by next week.
The first name - Sloane - was suggested by accidental-reader-of-this-blog Rob Williamson of Ohio in a post you can read for yourself here. He got it from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which just happens to be one of my favourite movies (and Ash quite likes it too). That wasn't what sold us on it, though; what sold us on it was that it was the first girl's name that we both had the same initial I-like-that-a-lot reaction to.
The first middle name - Lantau - is a placename that frequent Asian travellers may recognize as the island on which Hong Kong's international airport is located. We'd had it picked out for months. We passed through Hong Kong airport a few times on our Pacific Rim book tour, and it repeatedly proved itself to be an auspicious place for us and then-just-a-fetus Sloane. The first time, on a layover en route to Auckland, Sloane gave her first good kick at the baggage carousel. A few weeks later, passing back through on our way from Kuala Lumpur to Vancouver, there was a rinpoche (high-ranking Tibetan monk, roughly equivalent to a bishop) at the next gate, with a retinue of other Tibetan monks attending. Ash and I, having spent quite a bit of time around Tibetans in our time in India, knew he'd be happy to give mother and baby a blessing, which he happily did.
Second middle name - Bristowe - needs very little explanation, except to note that the last-name debate was itself long and protracted and only settled a few weeks ago. Ash was in favour of the girls taking one last name and the boys taking another. So Sloane'd be a Bristowe, and if we had a boy a couple years down the road, he'd be a Turner. Me, I preferred the hyphenated "Turner-Bristowe," in that order because the rhythm's better than "Bristowe-Turner." And at any rate I wanted Sloane and all her future siblings to have the same last name, so teachers and coaches and such would know they were dealing with kids who were on the same team, so to speak. A few weeks ago, Ash decided that although she still disliked hyphenating, she'd sign on to the "team name" concept, and the team could be Turner, with all of 'em taking Bristowe as a middle name.
Also, Sloane's got a bit of a nickname at only 24 hours old: Duckie. Though this could also be understood as a reference to a John Hughes movie (Duckie was Molly Ringwald's lovably oddball platonic male friend in Pretty in Pink), it grew out of this ridiculously cute infant's stocking cap with duckies on it that we found at the local consignment store.
So there you have it: world, meet Sloane Lantau "Duckie" Bristowe Turner.
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