Josh Brolin shares the story behind his newborn daughter’s unique name
Actor Josh Brolin and his wife, Kathryn, got the best possible present for Christmas this year — a new bundle of joy!
In a birth announcement on Instagram, mom referred to their baby girl as a “little Christmas evening angel,” and she revealed that angel’s name: Chapel Grace. Dad then took to his own social media accounts to follow up with the story of why they picked that unique name.
“Everywhere we have traveled the one place Kathryn and I always found a great solace in were chapels,” the 52-year-old explained in a post that accompanied a sweet photo of their swaddled newborn. “Not being particularly religious, but a God feeling heavily inundating our lives, chapels have always been the sanctuaries where we felt most connectedly free to give thanks.”
And since they couldn’t have been more thankful for their daughter’s arrival, they knew exactly what they wanted to name her.
“Chapel Grace is, to us, a manifestation of that celestial feeling that was always felt as we meandered and knelt,” he added.
The new addition is the second child and second daughter for the couple, who wed in 2013, though the “Avengers: Endgame” actor also has two adult children from a previous marriage. Their first child together, Westlyn, or “Bean” as her father calls her, turned 2 last month.
“In 2 years you have transformed this family,” Brolin wrote in an Instagram tribute to the tot. “With a look. A plethora of them. And when you tilt your hairy head on my cheek, and along with it a barely audible exhale, the ego melts and in a moment trickles mindlessly into the nowhere, where it belongs. Your mad looks, happy, surprised, confused, sad fill me with everything a Nobel prize is made of. You are my Medal of Honor, my gold star, my Olympic win.”
His tender messages about his girls illustrate how Brolin considers fatherhood to be his greatest role. And as he told Us Weekly before Westlyn’s arrival in 2018, it’s also his most enduring role.
“I’ve been a parent for so long, since as long as I can remember basically,” he said at the time. “I got out of high school, two years later (my first wife and I) had a kid. So I don’t really know life without having kids.”