Announcing the name.....

Ever since we decided to get pregnant the hubby and I have had a boys name picked out. It was the easiest decision to make in our lives. When the tech pointed to our little one's gender and announced that we were having a girl we both had drawn a blank on a girls name. It's such a hard thing to name another human being. We went through two books and numerous online sites jotting down any and all girl names that we did not despise. We were hoping for a unique-ish name that went well with our last name that didn't have any strange initials that could be turned into something else. We both had uncommon names growing up and didn't have to suffer through the millions of Jennifer's or Chris'. Life was easy, at least in that aspect, and we wanted the same for our little girl.

Once we came up with a list that had well over 50 names on it we decided that we just needed to say enough and decide on one. I fell in love with the name Cadence, but coming up with a middle name that didn't sound pretentious proved difficult. We are both relatively simple people and wanted our daughter to sound like she fit with us. We tossed around Cadence for a couple of weeks and tried to come up with middle names. That's where Emma came in. It sounded great, but something was just wrong. My hubby just fell head over heels in love with that name and would call her that when he was talking to me about her, or to my tummy. After three weeks I knew there was no unplugging this name from him and even though it's one of the top baby girl names of the last couple of years, I fell in love too. It just felt right. So then there was a middle name. I wanted to continue on with the simplicity in her middle name and Jean just stood out. It has significant meaning to me, my mom's middle name is Jean and so is my great aunt's middle name. It just all worked well together. My mom also informed me that my Great Great Grandmother's name was Emma as well. The stars just seemed to be aligning.

The final piece of this puzzle came from my mom. I was raised a Catholic and my mom was asking me if I was going to name our baby girl with a Saint's name. I said that it wasn't important to me because I don't really practice and my hubby was raised as a Lutheran. She decided to look at catholic.com and find out what names that we had tossed around were on the list. She discovered that Emma was a saint. She gave liberally to the poor, founded several religious houses and a double monastery at Gurk,Austria and her feast day is June 27th.....right within the time frame that our little one is slated to arrive. If this name we had selected wasn't more perfect I don't know what other name would be.

I do believe that things come to us for a reason and everything surrounding our little one's name has just made me smile and I truly believe we have made the right choice in picking Emma Jean. I hope you all like it too!

Emma Jean!