Baby Names

That title should get your attention :)  But this is not a pregnancy announcement (guys I just had a baby... remember?). 

I just wanted to tell you the story behind Jensen's name. 

McKay and I had a really hard time coming up with a boy baby name.  I could have 5 girls and still not run out of my "favorite" girl names, but I was stumped on a boy name.  So when we found out that we were having a boy we finally had to face our fears and come up with some boy names.  After much talk and a lot of "how about Bob?"  Um... Nope don't like it" we finally decided that we wanted the name to be a family name.  After we made that decision it was actually fairly easy to come up with a few names that we liked.  Apparently we just needed to narrow down the playing field.  In the end we came up with two different names, one from my family and one from McKay's. We loved them both, but for different reasons.  They were completely different names and kind of unique (ok Jensen is a VERY common last name, but not many are named Jensen as a first name) so we decided to just wait until we met the little guy.  My only rule was that we had to decide within the first hour or so after he was born.   For some reason I don't like it when people have a baby and then like 5 days later they name them... I know I am weird. 

Delivery day came and we got to meet this face...

Delivery was special, it was just McKay and I at the hospital for the first several hours getting to know our little man.  We decided within the first hour that we wanted his name to be Jensen.  No special reason, it just felt right. 

The name Jensen is from McKay's side of the family and was his Dad's mom's maiden name (or McKay's grandma's name).  So it was a last name originally.  McKay's grandma is an amazingly strong and faithful member of the gospel.  She owned her own farm, had 6 kids and served MANY missions for the church.  She has always treated me as part of the family since the day we met.  Such a neat woman and so I was very excited to name little Jensen after such a great example.

I was also named after one of my ancestors and I often wonder if they are proud of the way that I am representing their name and I hope Jensen will try and live up to his heritage too.

After we nailed down a first name we had to come up with a middle name.  This was my first experience with a middle name.  Growing up I didn't have a middle name (now it is Cannon obviously) and we decided to not give Adalyn one either so I was actually excited to choose one this time around.  We decided early on in our marriage (or maybe I just decided and McKay agreed) that the first boy's middle name would come from my side of the family since I don't have any brothers to carry on any family names.  So we decided to have Jensen's middle name to be Anthony after my dad (yes he goes by Tony most of the time) hi dad!  In the end I think it worked out perfectly to have Jensen from McKay's family and Anthony from mine. 

So there is the not so short version of how Jensen's name came to be.  :)




Part 2: (you didn't know that there was going to be a part 2 to this post did you?)

SO I have a confession.  A funny little nerdy thing about myself that I would like to share with the world. 

I was looking through my journal the other day and ran across a little gem...  WAY back when I was in middle schoolish (can't remember the exact date) I was really into coming up with baby names for my future children.  I even wrote some of them in my journal.

Ok you did too... yeah that isn't the strange part

I liked names that have a running theme between them

Like all of the names start with the same letter kind of themes.

Some of the "themes" that I liked growing up (ok I was nerdy) were-
-All the names started with T.  Such as Tasen and Tally
-You start with the letter A with the first child and then go alphabetically from there... Such as Adalyn (yes I chose her name back in middle school, still love the name today), Bella (liked it before Twilight), Ivy, Gaige, etc.  I had a boy name and a girl name picked out for each letter. 
-All of the kids would be named after cities or countries.  Such as Boston, Stockton, Paris, London, Adelaide, Dallas, Dakota, etc.
-All of the names end with an "n" sound such as Nathan, Dallon, etc.

Yes I am telling you all of these names because well, times change and I don't think that we will actually be using any of them for one reason or another. 

But

Secretly/deep down I still like/want my kids names to have themes.  Obviously at this point there is no theme, unless "lack of theme" is a theme, but we still might do themes with girls and boys (such as all the boys names would be family names), but we will have to see how it goes.  I already tried to talk McKay into doing all "A" names, but he said no.  So we will see if any of my other themes work out. 

I love thinking about names and I make McKay do it with me quite often.  Last Sunday we went over our baby names list and took a few off and added some really good ones that I really like. 

SO now is the time for you to comment and tell me how/why you chose the names that you did?  Do you like themes too?

Hope you are all having a great day!  Seriously.