Just in case you haven't heard, we revealed Merbaby's real name at Christmas. Are you ready...?

Perrin

(No, we haven't decided on a middle name, yet.) Perrin is another favorite literary character, this time from The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. There are way more "Perrins" in the world than we realized, too, including Spock's dad's second human wife. I guess Star Trek gravitates toward Charlie despite my refusal to consider "Jean-Luc" as a baby name. LOL We decided to tell early this time because we figured everyone was resigned to the fact that we were going to choose a name we liked, regardless of anyone else's preferences. Plus Caspian talks about Perrin all the time, and we knew it was only a matter of time before someone heard.

For the Fiskeauxs, we put a notecard in the tree that said, "For Whomever Runs Out of Presents First" on the outside, and "You get to see Caspian's new trick!" on the inside. Caspian's new trick was that he had memorized all of our first names. I'll post the video as soon as I get a chance. He gets a kick out of the fact that Charlie and I have names besides Mommy and Daddy.

At the Fraser's house, we could be a little more cryptic since they'd read The Wheel of Time series. We put three notecards in the tree, and anyone could take a notecard instead of a present on his/her turn. All that was on the back of each notecard (numbered 1, 2, and 3 on the front) was a picture:


On subsequent turns, people could ask for clues, so eventually they ended up with "_ _ _ _ _" for card 1, "_ _ _ _" for card 2, and "_ _ _ _" for card 3. We played hangman (without the hanging part) to fill in the blanks, so they ended up with "wheel," "time," and "wolf". After that, they got no more clues — they just had to figure out what the point of the whole thing was, as a group. Eventually, they guessed that we were naming Merbaby "Perrin" and were really excited.

A slip-up was likely to happen on Christmas, too, since we did a homemade Christmas this year and some of the gifts involved pictures of Perrin (which might prompt Caspian to tell). We made framed name mats that spelled "GRAND" for both sets of grandparents and put pictures inside showing the grandkids. Several other friends and family received Raktajineaux Snickerdoodle Latte Mix. Years ago, Charlie received some storebought snickerdoodle latte mix as a gift, but the company went out of business. He painstakingly recreated the recipe himself, and we packaged some up for gifts this year. We decided to make it look "real," so we made up a brand name and a label and everything. Raktajino is Klingon coffee, so we Fiskeauxed it by changing the "o" to "eaux" (and added a tagline of "Almost As Good As Prune Juice!" as a nod to its Klingon heritage).