Joshua Daniel

My wife and I held out hope that our second child would be a girl. We had had a girl name picked out since we were high school sweethearts. But we had a small list of possible boy names picked out as we went into the ultrasound where we were likely to find out the fetus’s sex. If it was a boy, he was going to be William.

We saw him for the first time. He was a boy. And he just wasn’t a William. How could we tell this, from a vague profile on an ultrasound? I have no idea. But my wife, our five year old son, and me all agreed. He wasn’t a William.

In the car afterward, we brainstormed names. My wife and I thought of boys we’d know with names we liked. After a bunch of spitballing, we came up with Joshua and Daniel. JD, we thought; that would be a good nickname. We tried it out and got comfortable with it. Yes, this baby was a Joshua.

My wife's father is Jewish, and we hyphenate our last names. One of our Jewish friends burst out laughing when we told her the baby’s name. “My parents would be so proud, if I met a boy named Joshua Daniel [wife’s last name]!” As much as we were trying to bring back our family’s Jewish heritage, we hadn’t realized what a Jewish name we were giving him.

Emily, Ottowa, Ontario, Canada