Baby Mason’s name is…

John Collin Mason and he will go by Collin.  The night we found out we were having a boy, we introduced Camryn to her brother Collin.  She immediately started calling him “Colls” and now his nickname will always be Colls in our family.  It was a risky move on our part to share his name with our incredibly verbal 2-year-old, but it was more important to us that she have time to get comfortable with baby brother before he arrived. 

Why We Chose John Collin

This is actually a different boy name than what we had picked out when Weston and I were dating.  We still love the original name, but it didn’t seem to fit with our family anymore.

John was always going to be the first name of our future son.  Weston’s first name is John.  His dad’s first name is John.  Weston’s grandfather’s first name is John.  His great great grandfather’s name is John.  You get the point.  As luck would have it, one of my grandfather’s names is also John, so this name comes from both of our families.

The name John became even more special to us in September when Weston’s dad unexpectedly passed away after fighting COVID.  His dad will be greatly missed, but we’re thankful we can carry on part of his name.

Something we noticed when we hung all our stockings for Camryn’s first Christmas is that all of our names are 6 letters – even mine and Camryn’s middle names!  Weston, Ashley Brooke, and Camryn Amelia.  We had to make sure all of our kids had 6 letters in their names at that point.  I mean, what are the odds that they all happened like that without any planning?

Since both of Camryn’s names were family names (one from Weston’s side and one from my side), we wanted both of Collin’s names to be family names too.  My dad has done extensive research on our family trees, so I knew we had a plethora of names at our disposal.  I asked him for the login information to view all the names and he happily obliged.  We literally looked through every single name listed on both of our family trees.  The only criteria we had at the time was that it needed to be 6 letters.  We made a list of all our favorites and Collin was at the top.  Coincidentally, Collin is a name from both of our families – a middle name from Weston’s side and a last name (Collins) from my side.  All from the 1800s like Camryn’s middle name!

We weren’t planning on doing another C name, but it is pretty cool that it worked out that way since Weston and his brothers all have W names.

Why We Kept His Name a Secret

We pretty much have the same reasons for keeping Collin’s name a secret as we did for keeping Camryn’s name a secret.  The name is sentimental to us, we didn’t want to encourage baby name stealers, and we didn’t want to deal with anyone’s opinions about his name.

We loved having a piece of this pregnancy to ourselves just like we did when I was pregnant with Camryn.  Plus, it was so fun hearing everyone try to guess Collin’s name after we announced his initials!  A few people guessed John, but no one was able to guess Collin!

Camryn’s Reaction

People frequently asked what Camryn thought about baby brother while I was pregnant.  I think it was difficult for her to understand for a while because I didn’t really start getting a baby bump until closer to 6 months.  After I started showing more and we could feel Collin kicking, Camryn was slightly more interested in talking about baby brother.  We weren’t sure how she would react to seeing Collin in person, but she was thrilled!  She talked about him all weekend and I think she was more excited to see “Baby Collin” this afternoon than she was to see Mommy and Daddy.  Camryn didn’t want to stop holding Baby Collin and grandparents were lucky if Camryn allowed them to hold him for a few minutes. She hasn’t wanted to leave his side the entire night, which is making bed time quite the challenge!