So, after several days of deliberation in which friends and family were waiting in annoyance for us to announce our boy’s name, we decided to go with the “weird” middle name.  I wrote this little note to Logan to let him know what the heck his folks were thinking when they named him.

Dear Logan,

So about your name. Logan, we liked the sound of. And of course, it’s also Wolverine’s name in the X-Men comics. Hopefully you’ll find a love of comics, as your dad did. (I’m still rolling the sound of these things around in my mouth: your dad, you mom. It’s hard to think that that is really what we are now.) We were kind of worried about it being too popular of a name, but in the end we just liked it and couldn’t let other people also liking it ruin it for us.

Logan, by the way, is also the name of our friend Chris’s dog. (Chris was the best man in our wedding.) If you’re naughty, we’re going to tell you that’s who we named you after.

So then we had to decide on your middle name. That was tough as well. We liked the sound of Logan Alexander, but what if you turned out to be a real character? What if you wanted something a wee bit different? And we kind of wanted to nab something from our travels. So we debated on a slightly strange middle name, to the point where everyone was annoyed with us because you were several days old and we hadn’t given you a name yet. In the end we decided what the heck, give him the weird one. You’ll can always keep your middle name secret, and hey, you’ll never end up on the do not fly list (well, unless you do something yourself to end up on the do not fly list). So yeah, your middle name ended up being a Scots word: Stravaigin.

Stravaigin means wandering, wandering aimlessly, roaming about. It’s a lifestyle your dad and I have embraced. We’ve lived in the US, Scotland, England, and Sweden (so far). When you were in the womb, you went to Czechoslovakia, England, Scotland, France, Belgium, Germany, The Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden, so you started life as a bit of a wanderer already. I hope you enjoy travel when you get older (and if you don’t, that’s OK too). If you do travel, I hope you discover the art of roaming, of getting a bit lost: in the place you are, in the moment you are.

Maybe it’s cheeky of us, too much cultural appropriation, but Scotland was the first place we lived that wasn’t the US, and the Scots language is rich with words that express something just a little bit more. And so Stravaigin is a bit more than wandering, a bit more than roaming, it is the idea of it, too. It’s the embracing of it. You’re not just roaming about, you’re stravaigin.

Stravaigin, by the way, is also the name of a restaurant in Glasgow. If you’re naughty, we’re going to tell you we named you after that.

Love,
Mom