When You Have Blog Drought....

I found this one while cleaning out my draft file and simultaneously flipping through football games yesterday. I swore I'd posted this way back when, but well, I was suffering from severe sleep deprivation. Since I am woefully at a loss for good posting material, I'll take a cue from Aunt Becky and revisit the past.....

Has anyone ever regretted their child's name?

I am beginning to wonder about Elizabeth....it's so long, so many letters, and takes forever to roll off the tongue.

You can't easily make up songs in the middle of the night with it. It doesn't work with the Name Game song either.

You start to think you may have chosen a clunker when the grandparents start calling her by her middle name.

Elizabeth is a beautiful name, but is it really my kid's name?

How did we come up with our baby's name you ask?

It wasn't easy.

As you know we struggled with that issue throughout the pregnancy. I thought I would go with the first two names I came up with, Lorelei and Noah, but the husband despised those names. I would come up with one I thought was wonderful only to have husband nix it because he could make a stupid nickname with it or someone else down the family line already owned it. It was very frustrating. I, in turn, nixed most of his names because, well, they were just ugly AND he had the audacity to suggest Heather, thinking I would not remember the time when we first started dating and he drove the ten hours to the beach to visit me only to stop off in Richmond for a quickie with "his friend" Heather. Yeah, let's name her Heather.

One weekend as we were traveling to the lake, Derick and I spent the entire three hours going over the name book, both boy and girls, and Jacob piped up from the back seat that he wanted Jordan for a boy (absolutely not) and Elizabeth for a girl. The husband was so sick of rehashing the whole scene that he decided he loved the name Elizabeth and why hadn't we thought of it before (he agreed with me about Jordan, sorry Jordan lovers). I, ready to move on to boy names thinking it was much more relevant, said okay and that was that.

Fast forward a couple months and I am still searching for a boy name. I sat down with husband one night to rehash it and for whatever reason I decided I wasn't too keen on Elizabeth after all and that we should just completely start over and find something we absolutely loved without a doubt. Husband still expressed his love for Elizabeth but agreed to look at anything I came up with....ditto boy name. So, I narrowed my list to variations of these names:

Boy: Ethan, Samuel, Benjamin, Noah, Andrew, Peyton, Nathaniel
Girl: Rachel, Sarah, Paige, Bridget, Erinn, Whitney, Gwendolyn (Gwen)

And eventually went with Ethan Samuel and Rachel Erinn. Obviously husband didn't agree with me. After much discussion, we then agreed on Nathaniel Peyton (to be called Nate) and Laura Elizabeth (to be called Laura Beth). So we tried on those names for a few weeks and decided we didn't like those so much either because Nathaniel was taken by some cousins and friends and, well, it felt too creepy to call our child Laura everyday (although idiot husband told sister we were using that name and now she is mad at me for not using it, whole other story), so we were back to square one.

Two days before Elizabeth's birth husband came in while I was watching Letterman (do not disturb during top ten list, geez) and let me know that he just really felt in his heart that we were having a girl and that he continued to see the name Elizabeth all kinds of places, like the news and The View and to him it was a sign that it was to be her name, so I agreed I would think about it but I still wanted to pack the name list in my bag and wait to see what she (or he) looked like. I did find it strange, though, when I woke up from what little sleep I got the morning of the birth and the song "Beth" by Kiss was tooling around my brain. Have you ever had that happen? What was even creepier, was that the same song came on the radio halfway to the hospital. Cue The Twillight Zone music please.

But anyway, after she was born and I got a good look at her, I felt she was a Rachel. Husband swore she was an Elizabeth. So, just like her brothers before her, she went nameless her first day of life, although unbeknownst to me, husband had already told everyone at work and church that her name was Elizabeth Laura.....gee thanks for letting me have some input dude. Of course, the next day was Friday and the birth registry lady came through to finish the birth certificate papers and she needed a name by 4 p.m. because, of course, she wasn't working over the weekend. I was still holding out for Rachel and he was still holding out for Elizabeth. It was a struggle of wills, I tell you, and I still think that after being cut open three times that I should have hand in that situation, but in the end we decided to go with our trusty formula used the other two times. We just put our choices together. The reason Elizabeth won out as the first name is because Adam won out as the first name last time, which was my choice and that's how we came up with our only daughter's name.

I guess it's too late to change it once the announcements have gone out right?

So there you have it, Elizabeth. When you're a teenager and want to change your name to Soleil or something equally "cool". You have proof that Elizabeth was NOT my idea so you can quit rolling your eyes at me.