Music Monday—Sweet Caroline

Gary and I had gone through all the thousands of possible boy names printed in the Baby Name Bible, each picked our top 10-20, and then he ran the numbers.  Well, no, actually he produced pages and pages of these charts with multiple columns.  We literally had spreadsheets compiled of hundreds of boy names in different combinations to help us decide the name of the boys.

James Marshall Gill

Marshall James Gill

Alexander James Gill

James Alexander Gill

Walter Geek Gill

Geek Walter Gill 

It was a big production, as it can be when you are married to an engineer.  There was even a column with just the initials to make sure they didn’t spell out anything questionable. 

There went Franklin Andrew Gill. 

With each pregnancy, our own top 10-20 would change so we had new pages of new results to ponder all those months until the newest baby came.  And ponder we did.  It’s hard to make that decision, picking what you think will be a great fit and respectable name, not too open to instant playground making-fun-of, not too trendy and not too stiff and not too cutesy, and on top of it, make both the mom and dad feel like they love it   like it  can live with it. 

One of our guidelines was “Can you imagine a President of the United States having this name?”  Guess that one guideline weighed pretty heavily since we have a Jackson, a Grant, and a Samuel. 

I really fought the Walter hard.

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All those years of us having babies, the girl spreadsheet wasn’t even a spreadsheet. 

We had one girl name.

Caroline Grace.  It never changed. 

We never doubted it. 

We both loved it, and that would be her name. 

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Right after she was born, we taught the boys to sing Sweet Caroline.  Jack was just turning five years old, Grant was turning three. 

They made up their own version they would sing to Baby Girl.   It was so incredibly sweet.  It went:

Sweet Caroline, bum, bum, bum….

Um, …something…

{OMG, I CANNOT BELIEVE I CAN’T REMEMBER IT!}

I can still hear Jack’s little voice and it had the words something like “We are your brother. There is no other—Sweet Caroline” but I cannot for the life of me pull it up in the brain right now!  Good thing we have all those family home movies, if I could ever locate them in my Gulf of Box-ico.

So anywho, Caroline has always loved the song and has seen it on YouTube so many times.  She does not care one bit for the Jonas Brothers’ version and I admit, she is right.  It totally, totally stinks.  Last summer while we stayed at a Best Western hotel in Dearborn, Michigan, they had some  promotion going.  There was a life-sized cutout of the three Jonas Brothers in the lobby and they gave out Jonas Brothers backpacks for the kids.  The boys refused theirs because, well, they’re boys.  Caroline refused hers because they stinkered up her song. 

Yes, Neil Diamond is/was forever the original, but here’s the Elvis in 1970 version that we have loved for years.  My favorite part is the karate arm moves for the bum, bum, bum part.

[Video link instead of video imbed brought to you courtesy of CSI-Rosewood—what I like to call my Country Slow Internet.]

 http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=Y00vd5HM_08&feature=related