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So we've been trying to name you. It's not an easy thing.

Of course we're not sure if you're a boy or a girl yet. It doesn't matter to us really, all we want is a healthy wonderful baby. We're sure you'll qualify to that. We are pretty sure you're a boy at this point... but we don't know for sure.

My only original qualification on your name was that if you were a boy, we'd make your middle name Norwegian, we'd name you after my great uncle Ledvin. Someone who taught me the value of our family name. Someone who changed my life, as I know you will. Obviously that doesn't work as a first name in this day and age, but I hope that you can take pride in it as something that is extremely important to me.

So we had that.

Your mother thought that we should make your first name something modern and Norwegian as well. Something that you could use here but that wouldn't be out of place in Norway. As you will come to learn, Norway is very important to both of us.

So we decided to go with that.

Now let me tell you, Norwegian names are not easy. They're either very Norwegian and wouldn't work over here at all. Something like say Sverre. Wouldn't work very well in North America. Otherwise they're not Norwegian enough, biblical names that we weren't really looking for.

So we looked and we looked and it ended up coming down to two.

We were going to pick either Soren or Espen, probably making the final choice when you come out into the world to meet us.

Before too long, Soren took the top spot. We both liked it... Espen fell to second, definite second. So we decided to check with the family in Norway.

This is how we found out that Soren is kind of a soft swear in Norway. There's a phrase that likens it to 'shoot' or 'darn'. So, we had to blank that one. Off the list. We'd gone a month or so with that as our top pick too.

So with that off the list, we switched our number one to Espen. It never really quite sat right with either of us, but we didn't really have any reason as to why... That was our number one pick for probably two more months. Until your mother was doing a little more research and found that it was a Danish variation of Asbjorn...

That's my father's name.

There's no chance whatsoever we were going to name you after my father...

So we're back to stage one.

This is a little bit of a problem as you're due to appear in our world in the next week or so. It would be much easier if you could just pipe up and tell us what you want to be named. It's such a major decision that will shape part of who you come to be. It's a lot of pressure.

Recently I've really come to like Kasper. Your mother says we're not allowed to duplicate initials, you can't have a J name or a B name. A K name would work around that. We can shorten it to Kaz, I like that too.

The problem with that one being that there's a Norwegian folk tale about a trio of robbers named Kaspar, Jesper & Jonathan. On a certain level it works (no, we won't name another child Jesper). Your mother didn't like the concept of it being about a trio of robbers though. The trick to the story is that eventually the robbers save the town and become respected citizens. You become the fire chief.

We can all respect a Fire Chief.

So at the moment, my favorite name is still Kasper. Your mother has come around to it too. It was originally on some of the lists of names we had come up with, so it's floated around since we first started thinking about it.

We're not going to lock it in for sure yet. We're going to keep looking. See if there's anything we come up with that we like better. We'll even wait for you to come out and tell us if you suit Kasper or not. I'm guessing you probably don't want to stick with Blueberry. Also, that would contradict your mother's no duplicate initials rule... So that's out anyways.

I think Kasper works. I feel far more solidly for some reason with that than I ever did about Soren or Espen. It was 42nd most popular name to give a baby last year after many years of absence due to the folk tale. So it's not too far out there... and it's not a top ten overdone name.

Then again, it could all be for naught. You could be a girl. We'll see at some point in the next seven days. We're excited.