What's in a Name?

Nathaniel Thomas is the name we chose for our sweet Little Man.

Vinyl name art I made for above Nate's crib

But why?

Thomas - I always knew that if I was blessed with a son, I would like to use my father's name as his middle name.  Fortunately, Jonathan was completely on board with that.  Since his family name is being passed down through our last name, it was important to me that a part of my family be passed down as well.

Nathaniel - A few years ago, I honestly don't remember if it was before or after we started trying to conceive (I think after...), Jonathan and I were riding in the car near Ithaca, NY (that detail isn't really important), and we were discussing future baby names.  We came up with the name Nathan and both really liked it.  So in our heads, we knew our first son would be named Nathan Thomas someday.  Well, once we actually got pregnant, we both had a strong feeling that we were having a boy... so we started planning on using Nathan as his name... but suddenly, a few weeks before our gender scan, it just stopped feeling right.  We wanted a name that had a short nickname, but a longer formal name.  We loved Nate, but just couldn't get behind Nathan anymore.  I had tossed "Nathaniel" out in passing while going through a ton of names one day, but we didn't put too much thought into it.

Fast forward to the day of our gender ultrasound.  We were sitting in the waiting room with another couple and their adorable little boy.  We heard the mother call him "Nate" and I looked at Jonathan and made some comment about Nate being a great name for a little boy.  His mother heard me and made mention that his name was Nathaniel.  For whatever reason, that sealed it for us and before we even "officially" knew that he was a boy, we had decided to name him Nathaniel.

Sometime very shortly thereafter, I was tagging a picture of us on Facebook, and just to be silly, I tagged my belly as "Little Man Fencik"... so the nickname stuck with us, and we have continued to call him "Little Man" both while I was pregnant and since he was born.

What other names do we call him? (There are a lot and many make no sense whatsoever)
- Monkey Butt
- Squeakers
- Milky Bear
- Nate Dawg
- Natty Lite
- NathanielMan
- Squiz
- Squiggles
- Mr. Fussypants

I know that there are more, but I can't think of any right now of the top of my head... I'll have to keep adding to this list as we go along.

Another shot of Nathaniel's name art above his crib