The Final Four

So I think we have narrowed our possible name picks for Baby Benson down to four, though technically there are still others on our “list.” You would think after trying to expand our family for almost five years now that naming our new baby girl wouldn’t be that difficult, we certainly have had plenty of time to consider our options. However we seem to still be a ways off from making a decision and may not share what we ultimately choose with our family and friends until she is born.

I can appreciate that this may be torture for some of you and others may just find it plain obnoxious that I am writing about our trying to decide, but that I am not going to share what “the final four” are at this time. However, I am going to share why I/we like them in effort to try to help myself to work through which one might be “the one” for our new baby girl.
Feel free to comment on my reasoning for each name and how you think that may or may not make the case for our selecting it. You are also welcome to share the way you have gone about considering/choosing names for your child(ren) in the past or currently if you are trying to conceive/expecting, especially if you have lost a baby/child and how they may or may not have factored into your future naming decisions.

That said, if you know any of our name options (as I have shared one or more of them with a handful of family/friends) or have any guesses (some of them may not be that hard to figure out from this post), please do not share in the comments here. If you are really curious and want to discuss, feel free to email me and I might be willing to divulge. However, my biggest fear in sharing the names we are considering with family and friends is that we really don’t want to know if people don’t like/love our choices as much as we do, as we don’t want it to influence our decision. We obviously really like these names or they wouldn’t have made it to “the final four,” so hearing that some of you might not care for them is not really very helpful to us right now.

Name #1:
Is the name that we had chosen for Sean if he had been a girl. We didn’t find out Sean’s gender before he was born. We decided on our boy and girl names well before his birth and shared them openly with our family and friends. Therefore it was fairly common knowledge back then what our choices were. So those of you who have known me/our family since I was pregnant with Sean in 2003, might recall the name. We obviously like it a lot or we wouldn’t have chosen it as the name for our first child had he not be a boy and named Sean Owen. The name has no family significance, however the first name is that of one of my sister’s closest childhood friends. I have always liked my sister’s friend a lot and that certainly has influenced my affection for the name. I think this name is beautiful in its full form and also lends itself to a fun/cute nickname. The middle name I have always found to be beautiful and I feel has special significance in light of our recent experience losing our baby girl Molly and then finding ourselves to be expecting again (without medical assistance) within a year of her birth and death.

This name is probably Bob’s first choice, along with many of our family members, as they got use to it when we shared that it was our “girl name” during our first pregnancy. My mother-in-law has not too subtlety been lobbying for it again this time around. Sean also really likes it, as he knows that if he had been a girl that it would have been his name and thus it seems like a somewhat obvious choice to him too.

What it interesting for me though, is that over the past five years that we have been trying to expand our family, I have gone back and forth on the name and how much I still would want to name a baby girl it.

We also clearly chose not to pick the name for our first daughter Molly Marie. As I have shared here before, Sean’s middle name, Owen, is the same as Bob’s and his father’s middle name and was Bob’s paternal grandfather’s first name. Molly’s middle name, Marie, is the same as mine and Bob’s paternal grandmother’s first name. I like that Sean and Molly’s middle names have a family connection.

This name is also a somewhat common name these days, in that I know other girls in our neighborhood with the name. However, I don’t feel that it is overused. We don’t have any family members or close friends who have named a child this name yet.

Lastly, I like names that have an Irish heritage, like Sean does and this name does not. Does it really matter? Probably not. But it is a small factor for me.

Note about middle names: Names 2 – 4 would most likely all have the same middle name, a shared middle name with our new baby girl’s older sister Molly Marie. I have a friend who has the same middle name as her three sisters and I think that is really nice. I like that our new baby girl could have the same middle name that Molly did, which is also my middle name. I could also choose to use Marie as the middle name for Name #1, however I really like the middle name we originally chose for Name #1, even though it is not a “family name.” So I find it difficult to consider using Marie instead and having gotten so use to our original choice for the middle name, it just doesn’t sound as good to me as our first choice.

Name #2:
Is a name that I consider to be a very traditional name. It is not that exciting, however I really like it and always have. It is the name of the main character in a book/movie that I loved and read/watched over and over again as a child (this may give it away, but please don’t share if you have figured it out). It has a cute nickname option. It seems to be less commonly used these days. However, I do know a few children in our neighborhood with this name. Sean also currently has a girl in his preschool class with this name, which I certainly think has influenced his affection for it as a potential choice for his new baby sister. There isn’t a lot more to say about this name, other than Bob, Sean and I all like it a lot and therefore it is a contender.

Name #3:
Is the first name I felt drawn to with this pregnancy when I thought about the possibility that we might be having another girl. It is actually the same as the middle name for Name #1. I think it is an absolutely beautiful name, with much significance after all we have been through to try to expand our family, especially since we lost our baby girl Molly. It has a cute nickname. It is becoming more common these days and I know a number of girls in our neighborhood with the name. It is probably Bob’s least favorite choice, because he thinks it sounds like an old lady’s name. However, he knows how much I like it and has agreed that it can stay on our “list” because he says that it is growing on him. Sean likes it too, though he pretty much likes any name that we tell him we like.

Name #4:
Is the most recent addition to our list. We never considered it with previous pregnancies because we literally had never heard of it. It is the least common/most unique name Bob and I have ever considered for a baby girl. I came across it for the first time soon after we found out we are having another baby girl. I was on Facebook (for a change) and looking at pictures that an old friend had posted on his profile. There was a women in one of the pictures (who turned out to be his sister-in-law, but also grew up in our home town) who had this name (the picture was labeled). I was immediately taken by it. I thought it was beautiful and wondered why I had never heard it before or known anyone to have it. Fast forward a few days and I was reading one of my online friend’s blogs. This woman doesn’t typically use her name on her blog, but somehow I clicked through some links and discovered that she had the same name! I totally thought it was a sign!

I called Bob at work to share the name and he liked it. He didn’t LOVE it, but he was on board with adding it to the list. Thus began my obsession with this name. I started to research it and what it means. I found out where it came from (it is associated with a variety of countries/ethnicites for its origin). I shared about this name with a few close friends and one family member and got a mixed reaction (which I expected since it is not very common). One friend said that she knew two other women in her lifetime with the name, however they pronounced it differently than I was saying it. This really threw me for a loop, as it never occurred to me that it could be pronounced another way. In time I also discovered that there is another way that it can be spelled, that is actually a bit more common than the one I like.

I contacted my Facebook (FB) friend and my blogging friend and asked them some questions about their experience with the name, including how they pronounce it. It turns out that my FB friend’s sister-in-law does not pronounce it the way I prefer it, however my blogging friend does! My blogging friend is honored that we are considering it for our new baby girl and was patient and open with me in answering all of my questions about her life with the name, which overall she has LOVED having. Thank you friend, if you are reading this! This name also has some things in common with the name Molly, which I like. I am not going to get into the specific details of the commonalities here, but they are a factor for me.

Thank you for reading and considering my reasoning for liking/loving each of our possible name choices. I have a lot more important things that I could/should be focusing my energy on right now, however for some reason this decision (which we still have plenty of time to make) was on my mind this morning. More than anything we are just hoping and praying for our baby girl to be born healthy and to get to come home with us later this year.

With Molly I wanted to name her right after we found out we were having a girl, as I understood that we might not have a lot of time left with our first daughter and I wanted to make the most of that time and to connect with her in anyway I could. With this baby girl, I am doing my best to connect with her and I do feel close to her, however, as those of you who have experienced a subsequent pregnancy after loss may be able to relate to, I still struggle with getting too attached to our new baby girl, as I fear losing another daughter. I don’t know how much, if at all, this fear of losing another child has to do with our inability at this time to decide on a name. I think all of the names we are considering would be beautiful and fitting for our third child/our second daughter.

Thank you for your continued kind words, support, encouragement, thoughts and prayers. We continue to take this pregnancy one day at a time. I look forward to sharing our name choice for our new baby girl after we decide and are ready to let people know (whether it is before or after our baby girl is born). I also still intend to post about Molly’s birthday/celebration of life and telling Sean about becoming a big brother again (am I starting to sound like a broken record?). However, both posts still need some work (right now they are really just notes about the highlights from both experiences). I am waiting until I can make some time to really sit with them and feel inspired to fill in the blanks in effort to help them to do justice to both milestones in our family’s life this spring.

I hope this finds you and your loved ones in good spirits. Take care and God bless.