On Tues­day, Dec 28 my lovely wife Julie gave birth to our third son. After some dither­ing back and forth (we’re method­i­cal about baby names) we picked Gre­gory. Every­one is happy and healthy. Vital stats: 20 inches, 7 pounds 9 oz. The broth­ers are adjust­ing well, though Theo’s first response to my phone call telling him it was a boy was “oh no, another one of those.”

That’s 5yo Fran­cis (aka “lit­tle big brother”) and 7yo Theo (“big big brother”) meet­ing their new sib­ling at the hos­pi­tal. More pics in the Gre­gory! and Gre­gory in the Hos­pi­tal sets on Flickr.

As you can see, we’ve basi­cally bred triplets spaced over three years apart. As fur­ther evi­dence, here’s Theo and Fran­cis in their first pics (links to their announce­ment posts):

As I men­tioned, we’re method­i­cal about names. When we were faced with Baby #2 I put together the “Fallen Baby Names Chart”–classic names that had fallen out of trendy use. It’s based on the cur­rent rank­ing of the top names of 1900. “Gre­gory” doesn’t appear on our chart because it was almost unused until a sud­den appear­ance in the mid-1940s (see chart, right). Yes, that would be the time when a hand­some young actor named Gre­gory Peck became famous. It peaked in 1962, the year of Peck’s Acad­emy Award for To Kill a Mock­ing­bird and has been drop­ping rapidly ever since. Last year less than one in a thou­sand new­born boys were Gregory’s. While we rec­og­nize Peck’s influ­ence in the name’s Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury pop­u­lar­ity, Julie is think­ing more of Gre­gory of Nyssa [edited, I orig­i­nally linked to another early Gre­gory]. Peck’s par­ents were Catholic (pater­nal rel­a­tives helped lead the Irish Easter Ris­ing) and were pre­sum­ably think­ing of the Catholic saint when they gave him Gre­gory for a mid­dle name (he dropped his first name Eldred for the movies).