Sooo....was he named after the islands? {wink, wink!}

After introducing Kaman to people, since he has an unusual name, we frequently get the response, “was he named after the islands?” And the answer to that is, “no.”

While I was pregnant, I checked out books, searched the internet, asked my husband (I gave up asking when all Duane could come up with was Duane Jr.), and just listening to other people saying names out loud. When I was about 6 months pregnant, one Sunday while sitting in church, one of the boys in my ward got up to accept an award he had earned, and when they said his name was Kaiman (spelled different then our little boy), I immediately turned to Duane and asked him if he liked it. Since both of us liked it the next step was to decide on how to spell it. We didn’t want to completely copy the boy in our ward, so we tried to think of different spellings: Kayman (that looked to girly), Cayman (like the islands – most people would know how to say it but would immediately assume he was named after the islands), Kamen, and Kaimin (this is a Japanese name and if I remember it was a well known warrior). Duane recalled the Kaman industrial distributor company on Geneva road and liked the spelling, and we agreed it was a more “manly” spelling and wasn’t too hard for people to pronounce, so hence the spelling of K-A-M-A-N.

Here’s our little man in front of the Kaman sign on Geneva Road.

It’s only at the doctors office where I get the most mispronunciations, so it looks like he’ll have to go through that in his lifetime, but we love the name and hopefully he does too.