Welcome Home Max!

We had and the kids had no idea! They had been and we couldn't wait to see the looks on their faces.

Making Introductions

We were at soccer and I couldn't wait for it to end to bring the kids home to their big surprise. Have I mentioned in all of this that we have four kids? Well, we had them all go in the backyard and close their eyes and brought the dog back.

When we told them to open their eyes, they looked around and the puppy was walking toward them. They looked at him and smiled and asked if he was ours to keep. We told them he was and they kept saying, "I can't believe we got a puppy."

The excitement seemed to wear off pretty quickly when they realized a puppy doesn’t come trained to follow every command rattled off by three kids yelled at the same time. The kids then decided maybe we should fly a kite instead (we didn’t do that).

The Name Game

After his long journey and then running around in the yard and meeting four new kids, the puppy was ready for a rest so he went to his crate and we set about choosing a name for our new little guy.

With three kids’ input and, of course, suggestions from my husband and myself, it was certainly a process. My husband had mentioned ‘Max’ at one point in the yard, but we went inside to finalize the decision.

Everyone got to suggest three names and we put them on a dry-erase board. With some gentle steering away from my four-year-old’s first suggestions of ‘Noodle Yummy’ and ‘Panda Beary’ we had a wide variety of names up for consideration.

The names had all sorts of inspirations–from Jake and Cubby from to Zac from the Zac Brown Band. Then we each took off our least favorite of our three names, which left 10 names on the board that looked like this (from what I can remember):

Sean

So starting with Eliza, she listed her names in order and we numbered them 1 to 10; we repeated that with everyone until after that…drumroll please…Max was the winner.

While I think my husband’s power of suggestion had a lot to do with it, it was a pretty good name for the little guy. I did suggest his full name by ‘Maximus’ as in one of my favorite movies, Gladiator.

So with introductions made and the name game played, it was on to adjusting to life with our newest addition.