Baby Names & Year to Date
Greetings! We are enjoying a great weekend of just hanging out together especially after my busy three weeks on internal medicine. I finished my internal medicine rotation last week and started anesthesiology on Monday…what a relief it has been to be on a normal schedule where I get home by early afternoon, am not on call and have my weekends off! Anesthesia has gotten off to a great start and I’ve done almost 20 intubations (for those not in the medical field it is process of putting someone off to sleep when they get to the operating room and then putting a tube into their trachea to help them breathe). The ability to intubate a patient and provide an airway is one of the most important skills that I need to master as an emergency physician because that is often the first thing that must be dealt with in order to help someone that is critically ill.
By the grace of God I’ll be on several easy rotations until the baby is born because the residency leadership was able to move my cardiac ICU month to later in the year and thus I’ve got two more weeks of anesthesia before going to ultrasound and then a couple more weeks of pediatric anesthesia. This has been a relaxing weekend for our family where we have gotten to just spend time together, go to church and have some time to catch up on some Bible reading. We also used some of our time today to decide on names for our new baby. We had decided on a boy name about a month ago but we had kept putting off deciding on a girl name until my schedule was a little more relaxed and we just hoped that the baby would not make an early appearance while we procrastinated!
We have had a tradition in our family of picking names that alternate between Indian and American names for first and middle names and thus this next baby will have an Indian first name and an American middle name. We also wanted to pick names that had a profound meaning…something that he or she could grow up to know that we invested much in choosing their name. So if our next baby is a boy his name will be Vivek Joseph Philip and if it is a girl it will be Anjali Ruth Philip. Vivek is a Sanskrit word that means “discernment or wisdom” and we thought that would be a wonderful attribute for a son – to grow up to be a man that has wisdom and can discern between right and wrong. We chose the middle name Joseph because Joseph is one of the great men of God in the Old Testament that led a life of purity, a man who lived out his faith in a pagan culture, a man who was selfless, and a man that trusted in God even as he went through so much adversity. Joseph in Hebrew means “God will increase” and we pray that if God blesses us with a son that He would bless him to increase God’s kingdom. Anjali is a Sanskrit word that means “tribute or offering.” Interestingly in Greek the name also means “messenger” like from the word Angel. We thought this would be good name for a daughter because we hope for her to grow up to be a woman that is a living offering to God with how she lives her life and we hope that she will be a messenger of good news to the people of India when we return there. We chose the middle name of Ruth because we admired her as a faithful woman of God. The story of her faithfulness to Naomi, her trust in God when she left her people to go to the land of Israel, and her faith in God to provide for her needs are all qualities that would be wonderful to have in a daughter. The name Ruth in Hebrew means “compassionate friend” and we pray that if God blesses us with a daughter that she will be like Ruth who befriended a new culture and people and called them her friends in that we will also ask our daughter to do the same when we return to India.
Just in case you wondered…Karuna is a word that comes from Sanskrit meaning mercy or compassion and her middle name of Allene is after Melissa’s great aunt who is an example of goldy living. Luke is a Latin name that means “bringer of light” and also named after the Biblical author Luke who was the gentile physician in the New Testament. Our prayer for Luke is that he would be a light to the people of India. His middle name of Yohannan is after my great grandfather from whom my Christian tradition of faith comes from.
The kiddos are both doing well. Karuna has started her second year of preschool home-school curriculum since she ended up finishing the first year of material in about three months. We keep asking her to take a couple of days off but because she thinks homeschooling is so fun, if she had it her way she would be homeschooling 7 days a week! Luke has become so much more talkative over the last few months. He loves to talk about “Bob the Builder”, “Can fix it it!”, “C is for cookie, enough for me” and “Go McDonald’s!” Melissa is down to about five weeks to go before the new baby arrives and so she is now to the stage of having weekly visits with her OB-GYN doctor.
I wanted to post some pictures from a while ago that I hadn’t put up yet. The first are some pictures we took in October when I went on a photographing date with Karuna to take pictures of downtown Dallas along with several pictures from the dedication of my cousin Dayle’s baby. The second are pictures from Ben and Megan Naylor’s wedding at the end of November. There are quite a few pictures in the second set of my sister Christine and her fiance Stan. As always just click the links to view the slideshow or just click the pictures below to view them individually. Have a blessed week!
Pictures:
By the time you guys get this, you’ll have a new baby, so CONGRATULATIONS to you all! Hope the baby is doing well, etc. God bless you guys, and good luck on your med studies Cristo!