Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, meet Green Bay baby Aaron Rodger Dryer.
You may not have much in common at first glance, but you’re both recovering from a broken left collarbone -- a twist of fate that helped new parents settle on a name for the newest member of their family.
Kyle Dryer and his fiancée Kristal Tyczkowski agreed on a girl’s name right away for their third child, but when they found out she was pregnant with a boy, they were stumped.
Both are big fans of the “Harry Potter” and “Lord of the Rings” movies, so they looked for inspiration in those films, even staying around for the credits to find possible monikers for the baby. But no luck.
“Watching tons of movies, we still could not determine a name for him. We thought, well we’ll just wait until he gets here and then maybe seeing him we’ll know what we want,” Tyczkowski, 29, told TODAY Moms.
“She was throwing names out I didn’t like, I was throwing names out she didn’t like,” added Dryer, 27. “We wanted to wait and spend time with him to see what would work best.”
Tyczkowski was ready to deliver on Sunday – a big football day in the Green Bay, Wis., couple’s household. Dryer, who grew up five blocks from Lambeau Field, has always loved the Green Bay Packers and football in general, he said. Tyczkowski is also a big fan, so she was watching a football game while she was in labor, she admitted. When the baby arrived, the medical team noticed he had a broken left collarbone.
A worried Dryer then recalled Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers was recovering from the same injury.
“When the nurse suggested he had a broken collar bone, I don’t know how serious I was at the time but I turned to my fiancée and said, ‘Well, how about we name him after Aaron Rodgers?’” Dryer recalled.
“I was totally on board with it right away,” Tyczkowski noted. “We thought that would be kind of a cool coincidence.”
They waited to make the decision official until the next day when X-rays confirmed the baby’s condition. They tweaked the name slightly, dropping the “s” from Rodgers for the baby’s middle name.
The doctor who delivered Aaron told the Green Bay Press Gazette that collarbone injuries are very common in newborns, noting the injury usually heals completely within a couple of weeks. No treatment is necessary, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Little Aaron is doing fine, the couple noted. The story made news when the parents explained how they named their baby in the birth announcement. Dryer is collecting all the clippings to show to show to his son when he’s older.
“It’ll be a good story for later in his life,” he Dryer said. “I wasn’t expecting any of this, I just thought we had our name (problem) solved.”