Delicious Ambiguity

Going from being a family of four, to a family of FIVE, has been such a great journey for us. I have been so amazed at how natural it has been to welcome Klaasen into our family and surprised at how well the kids have taken to him. I have seen very little jealousy and I have seen love pour out of Maida and Skogen in ways that I have never seen either of them show love before.

I love seeing the tender side of Skogen, how he rubs Klaasen on the top of the head, calls him, "Bub,"(short for Buddy), and likes to kiss him (and it has to be on the lips!).

I love how Maida wants to help with everything and I imagine that through our special times of her helping me, I'm teaching her to be a mom. My favorite time is right before bed when Maida sings Klaasen to sleep. My heart just melts.

Life is so good. Even with the disappointment of having a C-section, even with the pain of the surgery, and the energy it has taken to recover, I can't stop smiling and feeling like we have surely been blessed. God is good.

I have been working on Klaasen's birth story, but I'm finding it hard to take the time away from my precious babies to type anything at all! However, before too much time passes, I wanted to document a little bit of how we came up with Klaasen's name...

Klaasen (pronounced "claw-sen")

We spent the first eight months of the pregnancy trying out different names. Nothing seemed right. We searched baby books, asked friends, and went through our family trees. Finally Erik made a list of a couple of his favorites, and I decided that I would chose from those. One boy name on his list that we both really liked was Klaus, a name that we discovered in my family tree. We also liked the names Klass and Klase. However, none of them went well with a last name that started with an S. One night while texting back and forth, Erik and I came up with the name Klaasen. We made up the spelling and used the two A's together to make a long A-sound because Erik liked how it was Finish-looking. :) After Klaasen was born, we also discovered that Klaus is a last name in Erik's family tree and that Klaasen is actually the name of an asteroid.

Burke

While looking for names, my Aunt Carol suggested the name Burke, after my great-grandma's maiden name. It was different, it had a K in it, and it was a family name! By the time I was five months pregnant, I was sure that I would use the name Burke if we had a boy. After some research on the internet, I discovered that Burke Mountain is the name of a ski resort in Vermont! PERFECT! Since Skogen had a ski name, I thought it was only right to have a ski name for Klaasen, too. However, Erik really didn't like it as a first name, so I nixed my idea of having a middle name that started with an R (to match Maida and Skogen's) and we decided to use it for a middle name.