Will was born at 1:21 AM, and we were discharged very early: only 12 hours after Samantha delivered him into the world without an epidural, because it was Christmas day.  Promises were made to return to the hospital the next day (Dec. 26th) and have blood work done on Will.  The public health nurse called us at home to remind us to go back.

So we went to the hospital and were taken into the nursery where there was only one baby in an incubator, and he had his name tag prominently displaying that his parents had decided to name him Levi.

The nurse in charge left us alone in the nursery for a few minutes, and suggested Samantha feed Will in there, since there was another woman in the breastfeeding room next door.  The other woman wasn’t breastfeeding, mind you, she was just relaxing on a sofa.  We left her to her privacy, and Samantha fed Will while I examined Levi in his little baby bubble.

According to his chart, Levi’s situation had improved quite a bit since the day before.  They had stopped supplementing him with oxygen, and his heart rate had improved consistently.  He wasn’t jaundiced any more. His bowel movements were regular. Samantha had no idea what I was doing, so she asked me from across the room to tell her what his name was, and I said,

“It looks like his parents are naming him after a genocidal maniac who took revenge on a prince for sleeping with his sister by tricking every man in the prince’s city to mutilate their own genitals before he killed all of them and then stole their women, children and livestock.”

I really had no idea why his parents were naming him Levi.  I described the Genesis account quite accurately, but the parents of this baby could have had no idea whatsoever, and heard the first name of Sarah Palin’s daughter’s baby-daddy and just generally liked it.  It might have been a family name, and they might have been oblivious to the origin of the name.  This is the reason we didn’t tell anyone in the world what we were going to name our child until he was born.  We didn’t want to hear what other people thought of the name, and people tend to stop telling you their opinion of the name you chose after your baby is born.

The nurse came in and let us know that the breastfeeding room next door had been vacated, so we moved to it.  Over the next half-hour, we slowly realized that when you’re sitting in there, as Levi’s mother had been, you can perfectly hear everything said in the nursery.