Lapin a la Mode: How Our Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Got His Name...

Finding a name for a boy is sooooo much harder than finding a name for a girl, especially one that we both could agree on! Years ago, when bear and I were pontificating parenthood, we agreed that if we had a girl, her name would be Audrey. It's pretty, works in both languages, and I have always loved Audrey Hepburn. However, for a boy, we were kind of stuck!

At least we knew immediately what we wanted for a potential baby boy's middle names. Here in France, it is common to have two (Thomas's middle names are Bernard Noel). Since we lost both our fathers to cancer as children (me at 15, bear at 4), we decided to honor them by giving our firstborn boy their names- Gary and Francis- as middle names.

When we still had no potential boy's name in February, I started to stress a bit. The day after Christmas, it kinda hit me while I was in the shower that I was having a baby boy. No idea as to why, but I was fairly certain this kiddo was of the male variety. Thomas was not a fan of my name choices (apparently I like old fashioned French names) and vetoed anything fashion-related (Christian, Gabriel, Yves). He also nixed Nicholas because I wanted to use the nickname Nichou (I had joked if we had twin boys, we'd have Michel and Nicholas and call them Michou and Nichou). I was not sold on any of his suggestions either.
So, we decided to go to Buffalo Grill since I wanted some American cuisine to debate name choices. After throwing out lots of names, bear suggested Raphael. He had a childhood friend with that name- he spent many hours playing video games with him- but they had gone their separate ways in high school.

The minute bear suggested Raphael, I launched into the theme song of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Sure, there are the archangel and the artist, but my first thoughts went to the pizza loving sewer heroes. My initial reaction was no way should my son share a name with a cartoon character, but the name itself sounded quite nice... And we both liked said name, which is not something we could say of many other names...

We wanted to keep the name secret, but since I was on the fence due to the TMNT reference, I asked my bff Lauren her opinion. She convinced me it was a good name and only pur generation would think of the cartoon.
It took another week before I was completely convinced. We went to Venice to celebrate Carnivale with the entire Lugnier clan. Bear and I took a day to lose ourselves in the mists and tiny canals of the city. We found this amazing seafood restaurant filled mainly with old local Venetians and over a delicious lunch, the name Raphael was cemented as our choice for a boy! :-) Now I just hoped my mom would not hate it...