A Name is Born

This was our little list of names that we liked:

Lots of classics like Charles, George, James, Alfred, Edward which are all family names. I really liked the name Archie but not derivative of Archibald, hence the crossed out Archer. But our neighbors son across the street is Archie and that would be strange. We just liked the sound of Sam or Samuel with Mike's last name. Harold is a very popular name here in the south. Plus my favorite garbage man's name is Harold. Mike liked Espen - it is a Danish name. I really liked Desmond - after the character in the TV show Lost. We were trying to find boy names with Aki in them - like Akihiro or Akira - which is my Uncle Harry's middle name. We were only joking about José, although I think it has a nice ring to it with the last name. I really loved the name Axel or Aksel. I especially liked the Aksel spelling because we could shorten a Danish name to a Japanese nick name: Aki. Mattias was another favorite of ours which is a family name on Mike's Mom's side. We almost gave the boy two middle names and one of them was going to be Hajime (HA-Jee-MAY) which is my paternal grandfather's eldest brothers name which means, "the beginning" in Japanese - which I love. But our second middle name was going to be Thorbjorn which would have made for the longest name in history. We really liked Thorbjorn and we and everyone else was calling him Thunder Bear already so we felt we needed to keep that name. Some third string names were Valentine, Bjorn and Kenji.

I really wanted to honor someone on my side of the family since he would be having Mike's last name. We weren't going to torture him with a long ol' double last name! Imagine that with two middle names like Hajime Thorbjorn K________ S_________. That's a mouthful. I tossed in the name Stanley, after my dad and Mike liked it. He said something like, "That is a good person to be named after." No pressure little Stan. So then we had Stanley Thorbjorn Hajime. So long. I even looked into shorter Japanese names but none of them stuck:

I had a dream around my 30th week of pregnancy. I was calling out to my son and I was calling him Aki Bear. I told Mike this and he said, "Like Aki Bjorn?" Yes. He asked if it would be two names or hyphenated or one name. I said, "Two names." But then I saw this list that Mike wrote:

And I loved what Akibjorn looked like as one smooshed together, made-up, dual Japanese/Danish name.

And Stanley Akibjorn was born.

One of the coolest things is that the name Aki is both Japanese and Danish - well, actually an Old Norse name. See all of the meanings below:

Stanley = From a surname meaning "stone clearing" in Old English. A notable bearer of the surname was the British-American explorer and journalist Sir Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904), the man who found David Livingstone in Africa. As a given name, it was borne by American director Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999), as well as the character Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams' play 'A Streetcar Named Desire' (1947). My dad, Stanley K.

451. ÁKI: Old Norse name derived from a diminutive form of *anuR, meaning "father."
452. AKI (Japanese: 1-秋, 2-明, 3-晶):
     1. Danish form of Old Norse Áki, meaning "father."
     1. Japanese unisex name meaning: 1) "autumn" 2) "bright" 3) "sparkle.
         
        
        301. BJORN: Old Norse name derived from the word bjorn, meaning "bear."