Little Boy is Registered and Named

Just as I did 19 months ago and feeling a bit like deja vu, I did my solemn and civic duty last Thursday and had our little boy's birth registered with, Interim Registrar, Jack Spencer, at Westminster Town Hall. He not only became an official citizen of the United Kingdom but he has also been given a birth certificate with his name on, which is now Lucas Istvan Read.
He was always going to have Istvan as his second name. It's been the first name of every male on his mother's side of the family, for generations. But we've agonised over his first name for over 10 months and it's by far the hardest decision we've ever made. We just couldn't find a boys name that we were 100% sure about.
So, unlike Ruby, we made the mistake of including people in our decision making, which only ended up making the process even more difficult.
Either people had an immediate bad reaction, or knew someone with that name who were awful, or the name was already too popular or pretentious. For the benefit of Lucas, who might be reading this at some time in the future (son - I really hope you've been happy with our decision) or for anyone who might be struggling as we have, here are some of the contenders we came close to choosing. The closest we came was actually Jack. He was Jack in our minds for a long time but after we consulted, we became too aware of it's popularity. After Lucas arrived we tried out Alexander for a few days, a really great name with excellent shortening potential and Alexandranite is a precious stone, like Ruby. But it didn't quite seem to stick. Then there was Jasper, we were really happy with that, keeping the precious stone theme going and a tribute to painter Jasper Johns. But a bad reaction to that put pay to Jasper. Samuel was our alternative to Jasper and that stuck around, we liked it's derivatives, but again we just didn't feel 100% and Sam became a little too ubiquitous, there's a Sam's Chicken down our high street.
Otis, we thought was cool and Ibolya and I were keen but turned out a short lived contender. I liked it as I liked the idea of our boy being named after one of Groucho Marx's characters, he's Otis B Driftwood in Night at the Opera.
Ibolya had great inspiration with Sidney but we didn't like Sid. We had the same problem with Albert and Stanley; I loved the homage to Kubrick, Stan Laurel and it's a family name but we weren't so keen on their shortening to Al and Stan. Stanley had also been bagged by one of our neighbours. Some other long shots included Dashille - as in Hammett, Inigo - as in Jones and Jerome - as in K. Jerome and Saint.
On Tuesday, last week, a superb painting by Lucas Van Leyden, caught my eye in the National Gallery and we thought Lucas, as a name, had the right combination of sounding contemporary, without being popular, European (like our boy), unlikely to age quickly, without associations with anyone we know and comes with strong historical heritage.
As the name arrived so late in the day, and after trying so many other names, it's going to take us (and all our family and friends) a little while to get used to. But I hope we'll look back and our instincts will be vindicated and that our beautiful, precious, little boy will be happy with the name it's taken us so long settle.