The Name Game

Lillie and Henry were determined to be the future names of my children way back in high school.

Lillie was the name of my great grandmother, the mother of my Grandpa Dean, who passed away when he was a child.  I loved my Grandpa so much, he was a great man.  So creative, loving and friendly. When he died, I was devastated about the fact that my children wouldn't have the chance to know my grandfather in this life.  He passed away a year before Lillie was born.  Being named after my great grandmother myself, I have always been fond of family names.  So this was a no-brainer.

Henry is not a family name, which surprises most people.  I had been over at a friend's house one day in high school and her little brother had a friend over as well.  He was a cute little boy with blonde hair and big blue eyes and his name was Henry.  And I just really fell in love with the combination of a cute little boy and an old fashioned name.  So, when I found out that I was having a boy, it was an easy decision to name him Henry.

This last pregnancy started with Eric and me looking at baby names really early on.  I think Eric was trying to get me excited about being pregnant, as I have a hard time being excited about anything while experiencing morning sickness.  It was something I went along with to pass the time.  Anyway, I had a list of about 6 or more girl names that I absolutely loved and could see myself naming the baby any of them. The boys side of the list had a couple names that I threw on there just to put something down...there wasn't a single one that I was really excited about.  So, of course the baby ended up being a boy!  

After that we spent a lot of time going through names, books, online websites, etc.  We then would comprise individual lists, compare and debate and never coming to an agreement.  It was actually really frustrating.  I had bulldozed Eric on the naming of our last two children and had promised early on that he could have more of a say on what the name would be this time.  But at the time that I had promised that, I thought that we had similar taste in names...

Anyway, in the last week or two of the pregnancy Eric and I came to a compromise.  We assigned names to different hair colors and decided we would name the kid based on that.  Brown hair would be Owen, black hair would be Cole, Blonde would be Tate and Red would be Ian.  I agreed to this because I was 99% sure that I would have a brown haired, brown eyes baby, just like my other two.  I had pretty much already decided to name him Owen at that point.  We had even started calling the baby that, but Eric was still on the fence.  So, anyway, I agreed to wait and see and what do you know, our baby popped out with copper hair!  Eric said that first day, he definitely looks like an Ian.  But because I felt like my mind had already been made up, I fought it for a good day and a half before I admitted that he definitely looked more like an Ian than an Owen.  So, Eric won and now I can't imagine his name being anything else.  The middle name was never up for debate, my father-in-law is an amazing person.
A really good man that I hope Ian will become like some day.