Beignets, Names, and Future Wins

Today, we took our grandsons to the cafe au lait and beignets place. Inside the place, I mean.

Except for one, two times, I haven’t been inside a restaurant for 12 months.

We ordered three plates of beignets and one croissant because it was an after-school snack, and the beignets might not have been sufficient, thus the croissant.

As we ate, we talked about the derivation of names. We went through the litany of where each of our names came from, starting with the grandkids. This is significant. The province of your name can be a kaleidoscope into the past. The oldest grandson has four names because, as he pointed out, his third name was the only one from his mom’s side of the family. He has the most names in his third grade class–score! We also talked homonyms (because I CAN’T HELP IT–I love using new words with the kids) and the second grandchild has a name (Searcy) that most confuse with its homonym (Circe).

We also talked grandparent names (Gogi and Gandy). Both the boys thought they had given us our grandparent names. In truth their mama wanted all the grandparents to choose intentional grandparent names before the first child was born. I’m not sure whether our striping them of their naming rights discombobulated them or not.

I do know this. I told them I was double-named. My Ellen comes from my father’s great-grandmother and my mother’s grandmother. So my naming comes from both sides of the family. Because we’d been discussing the family origin of each of our names (who on the father’s side contributed the name, who on the mother’s side), my double naming impressed my oldest grandson. “I think that would be unusual,” he said.

It’s a win when you can impress a grandson.

Thank you, Jesus, my husband and I have both being fully-vaccinated. Also, the virus level has fallen like a rock in Orleans Parish. As a result, we can only hope that soon we’ll have more opportunities to impress the kids.