Lucas Camilo

As we enjoyed a wonderful and moving wedding ceremony on Sunday, we recalled our own celebration back in June. After getting pregnant with Lucas we decided to have what we jokingly called a “shotgun commitment ceremony”, and eventually we brought a group of friends and family together for a celebration on a beautiful farm in northern Virginia.

For personal and political reasons we had chosen not to get married, but it was still important for us to mark this special moment in our lives: the monumental decision to have a child together, our commitment to each other, and the celebration of community that would continue to be a part of our lives once we became parents.

At the time Krista was five months pregnant and we never imagined that two months later Lucas would join us in the world. Nor did we imagine spending the subsequent two months in the hospital with people saying things like “Is your wife pumping, Mr. Hanson?” (There’s actually three things wrong with this statement: we’re not married; Burke’s last name is Stansbury, not Hanson; and it’s just kinda weird when random dudes stop by wanting to talk to Burke about breast pumping!)

Anyway, many people have asked us about how we came up with Lucas’s name, and so today we thought we’d explain a little about where it all came from. The background of our decision not to get married is important because the story actually begins with the last name. You see, a few hours after Lucas was born we still didn’t have a name for him… neither a first name or a last name. We’d imagined hyphenating our last names, but Stansbury-Hanson seemed like a lot of syllables for the kindergarten teacher to handle. We’d also imagined coming up with a new name that combined both our names– Hanstan was a favorite, followed by Hansbury – but that also had its drawbacks. So as we sat down with the birth certificate on the morning of Lucas’s surprise birth we finally decided to give him just one of our last names and make the other one a second middle name. Being anti-patriarchy and all, it seemed only logical to give him Krista’s last name.

So on to the first name. Despite spending weeks in the hospital after Krista went into pre-term labor in Seattle, we managed not to find out our baby’s sex, and therefore we ended up with a lot more good potential names for girls than boys. It didn’t matter much because on August 17 we still hadn’t settled on anything, and in the rush to the hospital at 3:30 am after Krista’s water broke we didn’t grab our scribbled list of baby names anyway.

But we had some favorites, and one of them was Camilo. We had explored a lot of Latin American revolutionary names but most of them – Farabundo, Augusto, Emiliano… – didn’t translate well into English. Camilo had a certain ring, and we liked the story and legacy of Camilo Cienfuegos, a revolutionary with a long, scruffy beard who joined Che and Fidel in the mountains of Cuba in the late 50s in their quest to wrest the island from the grips of a US-backed dictator. Camilo tragically died shortly after the triumph of the Cuban revolution, but he’s still remembered for his hilarious, irreverent antics, which he wasn’t afraid to pull out even in the midst of a treacherous guerilla war. And then the capper: hours before her water broke Krista dreamed that she gave birth to a bearded baby. Thus, Camilo.

In fact, we almost gave him this name as his first, and it should be noted that most if not all of our Salvadoran and Mexican friends insist on calling the little guy “Camilito”, which is all good by us. But something else happened on the morning of August 17 that helped lift up “Lucas” from the list of names. Krista courageously gave birth to Lucas – naturally, if not at home with midwives as we had hoped – right as a spectacular sunrise was lighting up the sky outside the hospital window. She even got to pause at one point between contractions to join Burke and the nurse in marveling at the pinks and oranges stretches across the sky. “Lucas” means “light” or “bringer of light” and on that day the little fella WAS the wondrous light that came into the world. The design of this blog also recalls that beautiful moment when we were so blessed to have Lucas Camilo join us in the world.

So there it is: Lucas Camilo Stansbury Hanson. It’s a mouthful, but he’ll have lots of variations to choose from if he gets sick of “Lucas Hanson”. For now, Burke will continue to be known around the hospital as “Mr. Hanson”, and Lucas by his 1920s train-robber alter-ego name, “Baby-boy Hanson”.