What is the story behind the names of your children?

[buttercup]

I LOVE hearing stories about how parents choose the name of their kids. What are your children's names, why did you choose it and how did your family/ friends react to the names when you told them?

My dd's first and middle name is Helon Shu Chen. Helon DH maternal grandma's name and Shu Chen is my mother's name. Both women are very strong and independent (this may hurt me when dd enters adolecence). When I was 5 mos preggo, DH and I went through several names and could not agree. I knew that I wanted dd's middle name to be Chinese, but I had a hard time deciding. DH really liked the name Bree and I love the name Constance or Isabella. Picking names from our families was easy and quick.

My mother had no reaction when she found out, but my dad said she was honored. She was more excited about having her first grandbaby. MIL cried when she found out because she was very close to her mother.

We love our little Helon.

Thanks for sharing,
Jenni and Helon 6/29/02

[Liz]

My husband has a strange attraction to the girls names: Susan, Suzanne, Susie, etc. so he insisted that if it was a girl it had to be one of those. In return he said I had carte blanche if it was a boy. In my husband's family the first born son of the first born son alternates between Gerrit and Hubert. You guessed it, they're Dutch. My dh name is Gerald, an anglicized version of Gerrit so we were stuck with Hubert. DH did not at all insist on honouring this tradition but I was quite close to his father so I thought it would be a nice thing to do BUT we made it the second name. Now I didn't change my last name when we got married but I could never decide what to do about my child's last name. My husband's last name is really long (van some long dutch name, as many friends say) so hyphenating was out of the question. I didn't feel up to the uproar if I insisted the child have my last name. SO I gave him (yes, it was a boy) my last name as his first name. So, without telling you his name (somehow that seems too personal, don't really know why) it's my last name Hubert van some long dutch name! Quite a mouth full.

[Foobar]

Goo (not her real name) has her first name from DH's grandmother. She was one of the strongest women I have ever met. Goo's middle name is my grandfather's middle name which is one of those names that can be used for either gender.

We wanted to honor those strong people who have left us with a new strong person!

[hulamama]

I was an exchange student to Australia, and dh's favorite book is Siddharta....so Sydney was kind of a compromise between the both of us. She has two middle names--one is my middle name and one is dh's.

[lilyka]

madeline is just a name we liked an thought we were being original (along with several hundred thoushand other people that year) and Ophelia is from Hamelet one of my favorite stories ever.

lilyka (lillica) is from a girl we met. Ihated it but dh insisted. It has grown on me. Mae is Dh GM (sweetest lady on the planet)

Ava is a name we liked and Alexandria is a varient of my name, dh middle name and dh grandpa middle name.

[Moon]

I'm going to take this opportunity to tell you all that my girls are not called Maeve and Sophie.....those are names I gave them for the net and would have been the names that I preferred, but yanno.............family and fathers will weigh in......Maeve is because of the Yeats' poem "The Old Age of Queen Maeve" and Sophie was my Granmother's name.

Their real names are *very* close to these, though. Maeve's name is another Irish name that sounds very similar, and Sophie's is Italian, with the same vowel sound.

Don't anybody get ticked off now, you just hear too many weird stories.

[jannan]

i named her that because when i was in college i was a spanish lit major. anyways , the women from the catalan region of spain are called catalinas. i really liked it . and celeste is the name of the first daughter. for example, my middle name is celeste because i'm the first daughter of the first daughter. my mother is the first daughter of the first daughter so her name is celeste.

[1jooj]

We wanted a prophet's name for our ds, and I wanted it to be the name of a prophet accepted in Judaism, Christianity and Islam--my parents are Christian. We'd discussed several, and the morning I went into labor, dh opened his Qur'an and ds's name was on the page he opened.

[tessamami]

I have read that it also can mean "exuberant" like in music. All together my DD is Allegra Joyce meaning exuberant joy.

She is very musical like her musician dad and a very happy child, too. So it fits.

A friend of my mother's, (my mother's friend's daughter) is named Allegra and I always thought it was a pretty name - you have to role the R.