The Naming of Jesse

Picking a name for a child is a difficult task. A person's name is frequently one of the first things that people learn when they meet someone new. It is difficult to change your name. And you have to pick the name before you know anything about your new child.

Mira and I have our own constraints on what names we want. Mira, who had her name mispronounced and misspelled throughout her entire life, wants names that are easy to spell and pronounce. I want names that sound nice (which seems to mean no hard stops, based on the names I like and don't like). We are also following Mira's family's tradition of naming in memory of dead relatives that were important to us (and by naming in memory of them, I mean the first letter has to be the same). Since we are raising our children as Jews, I want them to have Irish middle names in recognition of that part of their heritage (this somewhat conflicts with Mira's requirement that the names be easy to spell and pronounce). And Mira has a rule that we can't use names of any of our exes (which mostly just eliminates one of my favorite names, which is of course Irish, easy to spell, and easy to pronounce).

Operating under those constraints, we chose the name Jesse Liam for our son. Then we chose the Hebrew name Yaakov Lev. Jesse is a biblical name (the father of king David) which means gift. Liam is derived from Wilhelm and roughly means helmet. Yaakov, also a biblical name, has a complex meaning because of the story in which it appears. It means protection according to some sources and basically usurper according to others ("one who grasps"). Lev is the hebrew word for heart. So translating his name into concepts produces "gift of protection, helmet of the heart."

Jesse is for our maternal grandfathers, Jesse and John, Mira's great-uncle Jake, and Mira's great-great-aunt Jeannette. Liam is for my grandmother Love and my great-uncle Liam.

Diaper Changes

I tend to collect a lot of data because I like to analyze data. I have roughly kept track of how much diaper laundry I have done for Jesse, which roughly corresponds to how many diaper changes he has had. Our diaper pail fits approximately 20 diapers, so that is about how many are in each load. On average over the past 9 months, we have had to do 2 loads of diapers per week. The following graph shows about how many diapers Jesse has used per day (with some smoothing), starting in late January:

The data is a little off in some places because of trips and extra diaper laundry when we got new diapers, but I think I mostly corrected for those errors. The large spike near day 100 (which corresponds to early May) was when we started potty training him using elimination communication. The way that worked for us was to basically change his diaper every half hour and put him on a toilet every time. To some degree, this means that the data is scaled differently before and after day 100, because prior to that most diaper changes were with saturated wet diapers, and after that, most diaper changes were with diapers that were barely wet. When we first started EC, his diaper was wet every half hour, which is why there is a huge spike in diaper laundry. Then he started learning to wait for the toilet when that was possible, and the diaper laundry decreased. Additionally, I started using washcloths instead of real diapers because we didn't need much absorbency, and more of them fit in the diaper pail. The downward movement was somewhat exaggerated by some trips in June and July, so I don't think the increase near 150 is real. The increase just past 200 represents moving him back to real diapers all the time as he got better at waiting and started crawling in ways that made the washcloths not work. The decrease past 250 represents progress on toilet training.