The boys are asleep.

I stir from my upholstered island
to wade out between the day’s debris
of train tracks and crayons, legos and laundry.
I follow a trail of Pokemon cards and marbles
up the stairs, breadcrumb-like,
all the way to their rooms.

And here I stop to visit each of them in turn,
amazed in this moment by their united quiet,
by their collective lack of activity.
It’s as though they filled the day
with such relentless noise and feverish enterprise
because they were saving up all their silence,
all their idleness and inaction,
to spend it here, now, all in one stretch.

I sit with Levi, first.
His head is buried under the pillow,
and his comforter is knotted around his body
from consistent rolling in the same direction.
The turbine sleeper.
I push his pillow off to the side,
and he draws a deep breath of relief.
Lord, grow this one in wisdom and restraint.
Guide his steps, and draw his heart to you.

I come to Logan next.
His bed looks empty at a glance,
but a large lump under the blankets in the middle
gives him away.
The fetal ball sleeper.
I scoot him back up to his pillow,
and tuck the blanket under his chin.
He twitches, cocking an eye half open.
Lord, grow this one in courage and perseverance.
Guide his steps, and draw his heart to you.

Then last to Cambren.
His blankets are flung off the bed
and he’s laying with limbs spread in all directions,
perpendicular to the mattress.
The exploding sleeper.
I straighten his little body
and cover him up again.
He grits his teeth.
Lord, grow this one in patience and compassion.
Guide his steps, and draw his heart to you.

I hear pattering on the roof. It’s starting to rain.
Looking once more over the placid faces of my sleeping sons,
I wonder where their journeys will take them.
I whisper a final prayer for the night:
Guide their steps, Lord, and draw their hearts to you.

They tell me that Columbus is a decent guy, but they’re getting awfully tired of seabiscuits.

All three of our boys have two middle names: a dedication name first, and a nature-inspired name second. With Levi and Logan we added the dedication name later, but with Cambren we decided to just get it on the birth certificate from the get-go and save ourselves a few bucks and government forms. Their full names are:

• Levi Jacob Sequoia Williams
• Logan Curtis Riverstone Williams
• Cambren Louis Northstar Williams

For each of the dedication names we decided to honor someone who had invested time and love in our lives, or the lives of our sons, or both. For Levi we picked Lisa’s grandpa, Jacob (AKA- Ted). For Logan we picked my dad, Curtis. And for Cambren we picked Lisa’s great uncle, Louis. All of them are/were great guys that embody traits we would like to see our sons grow into.

For each of the nature-inspired names we picked something we could find in the northwest that could symbolize spiritual qualities we hoped for in our boys. For Levi it was Sequoia: Standing tall, pointing to heaven, and living in community. For Logan it was Riverstone: Firm and solid, yet shaped by the living water.

For Cambren we picked Northstar. Our desire for him is that he will be a reliable reference point for those around him, pointing them to “true north”, and that he will shine with a clear light in the darkness.

So that’s the scoop.

So where did the name come from? The simple answer is that we made it up. Yep. Believe it or not, every name started that way somewhere. Ours just started here. Technically, we aren’t the first to use the name, just among the first (as web searches have since shown me), but we arrived at it on our own all the same. It was inspired by “Cambria”, which was the ancient Roman name for Wales (part of Britain).

What does it mean? Lisa and I decided to give Cambren the meaning “Trustworthy Ally” — the kind of guy that you would want for a brother. We didn’t pick that totally out of the air — it goes back to the Welsh root. To keep it really short, Cambria was a latinized form of the welsh Cymru, which is thought to derive from the old brythonic word Combroges, which meant “compatriots.” Probably because the Welsh could be counted on by the Brits to stand with them against the marauding Anglo-Saxons. Or something like that.

But if that’s too messy of an explanation for you, just go with “they made it up because they liked the sound of it,” and you won’t be too far off the mark.

He weighed in at 8 pounds and 14 ounces (just 4 ounces shy of Levi, the proud record holder), and measured 20 inches long. Apparently that’s pretty heavy for the length. The nurse wrote down his stats and promptly dubbed him “The Chunk.”

The photo above was taken when he was already a few days old. He was pretty bruised looking in the face for the first couple days, so we took this one when he was a tad more photogenic. I’m still not clear on their explanation for the bruising, but it was either a bit of squishing trauma from the birth canal, or a choking trauma from the umbilical cord (which got wrapped around his neck very briefly), or an exploding trauma from shooting out quickly at the end (which, believe me, he did).

Lisa, as always, was an amazing warrior through the whole thing. I can’t even begin to relate what she goes through every time we have a baby. The closest point of reference I can think of is the execution scene at the end of Braveheart where they disembowel William Wallace (and on a Tourettes note, I always have to resist a faint impulse to shout “Freeeedommmm!” at the moment that the baby finally comes out). An important difference, though, is that Wallace only had to do it once…

Doesn’t having a baby sound fun?

Special thanks go to our friend Margaret Cochran who was an outstanding birth coach for the second time in a row. She has now helped deliver both Logan and Cambren (and, on a cosmic footnote, Cambren was born on Margaret’s birthday!).

I’ll share a little about Cambren’s name when I have a chance to post again.

My oh my, he’s not so little anymore, is he?

Hey in there… yeah you, Mr. Tubs. You can stop growing now. Get much bigger and you’ll have to come out the barn door… and we’d like to avoid that if we can, for Mommy’s sake.

We recently had our ultrasound visit to determine the gender, and… (drum roll please) … it’s another boy! Nana’s scorecard now reads: Boys – 6, Girls – 0. Quite a run for the little men. I know that some of you were rooting for a girl this time around, for the variety if nothing else, but I’d like to point out that maintaining a standardized testosterone level among your children does have certain advantages. They wear the same clothes, like the same toys and movies, and enjoy doing surprisingly similar things (which would probably include burning the house down to the ground if we weren’t watching, but that’s another story). The point is that having all boys, in some ways, simplifies and focuses our task of parenting.

After going 3-0 on gender I’m feeling that the verdict is in, but some of our friends continue to argue for the truth of the 50-50 School of Conception: that the odds are always evenly split between having a boy or having a girl. These clever statisticians, with their talking points about penny-flipping and probability, can be fairly convincing. But ultimately, I think the idea is a little over-reductive. Sure, the overall population of the earth is going to approximate something very close to a 50-50 split (unless China has any say), but I think that individual couples might well have a genetic propensity for making one gender more often than the other. It’s just easier to explain large all-boy or all-girl families if you allow for the possibility that the parents’ gender odds were somewhere around 70-30 or 80-20 to begin with. The thing is, no one is really interested in helping science to pin this one down. Come on folks, you would only need to have around 50 children to reach a sufficient sample size… but I digress.

We haven’t picked a name yet, so we’re running with the codename “W3C” for now — that stands for “Williams 3rd Child” and is a little pun at the expense of the World Wide Web Consortium. Ha ha. Maybe you have to be a web geek to appreciate it.

I’ll keep you posted as we edge closer to the little guy’s due date!