I must say it is pretty cool to be able to name a person--to think of the most influential men or women in your life, of the qualities and traits you hope your kid will embrace, the people you would honor with the hope that your son or daughter may be a little bit like them--or at least like being named after them.

There were three influences for picking "Ian." One is that it is the Irish derivitive of Jon, and Ian Mark is at least an eighth Irish. Then, two people we're fortunate enough to have in our life inspired us to like the name even more: Ian Rogers and Ian Mackaye. We hope Ian Mark is graced with a child-like love of life that Ian Rogers shares with us, and that he may know a spiritual peace and compassion that Ian Mackaye has embraced us and so many others with.

We gave him the middle name of "Mark" because when I was growing up, my best friend died of cancer. He struggled for 2 years with the very painful terminal disease, way longer than any of the doctors thought he would live. I tattooed my arm with a reminder of him, because he was so afraid of being forgotten. I always told myself that if I had a son, I would name him after Mark--out of loyalty to him, and hope that my son would have the strength to love and live and fight in the face of death. I think those are some of the very qualities I love about our good friend Mark Thau as well, so for both of them, he had to have a Mark in there.

And as for the last name--we just couldn't decide what to do with that, so since I already bought the vosspotts.org domain, we figured we'd just stick with that. I guess that makes him a dot-com baby!