Baby Name Reveal!

After more twists and turns than a Summertime Hollywood Blockbuster, Cindy and I have come to a conclusion on what our new baby's name will be!!

First though, a recap for those of you just tuning in.

Kate, the birth-mother of our little girl had requested that she be named Grace, since she feels very strongly that it's only by the Grace of God that she's even making it to this world. We love the thought, but aren't really so hot on Grace as a first name. It's fine as a middle name though, and Kate is perfectly happy to know that she had that lasting influence on this baby.

For Cindy and me, our task became to find a name we liked that went well with Grace as a middle name. We were also hoping to make the first name somewhat simple, since it's being offset by an eleven letter last name.

My favorite from the beginning was Emily Grace, and we'd call her Emma. The problem is, we know a LOT of kids named Emily and Emma right now. Cindy was definitely justified in pointing out how common those names are. While looking at baby name websites, she fell hard for Ava, but for some reason I'm just not feeling that one... Then I offered up Julia, which I was PRETTY okay with, but Cindy felt just like I did about Ava. From the same list-looking session we pulled out Mikayla as a possibility, but with the exception of Tyler, none of us really thought it would make it through to the next round.

At that point, we did a secret ballot election with the family, and put a poll up here on the blog... The secret ballots revealed Ava to be the winner. In the poll, it was Julia by a pretty big margin. Then we had our 36 hours of cold feet, took the poll down and cancelled the announcement of the winning name.

If you were here yesterday, you know that we had since committed to adopting this baby no matter what, and with that added sense of reality, I realized that I really didn't feel right about Ava as a name. Can't put my finger on why - just didn't fit! So Cindy conceded that we could use Emma. I even went so far as making up a fancy graphic of her name to use here in revealing the name.

But... It didn't feel quite right to use Emma either, especially since Cindy really didn't want it from the start. So I hit up the lists again. I found a really good site that gave the top names for every year going back over 100 years, and as a bonus, next to each name, it showed how much it had increased or decreased in popularity that year. That made it much easier to see trends, and watch the rise and fall of naming fads.

Not seeing anything on the recent years that we hadn't already looked at several times, I decided to check the years we were born. Me (1968): Blah... Cindy (1970): A couple of intriguing ones, including Danielle. I always thought Dani was a VERY cute name for a little girl, so I brought it up with Cindy and the kids last night.

An amazing thing happened next:

NOBODY SAID "I DON'T LIKE THAT ONE!"

In fact, everyone said something along the lines of "I Like Dani!"

So then it was up to us as responsible and yet unbelievably awesome parents to come up with a spelling that was unique enough to be fun, but simple enough for a young student to handle when paired with our rather intimidating last name.

So now that you know The Rest Of The Story, please join us on December 5th in welcoming to the world: