Naming a human you don’t know is probably one of the hardest things I have ever tried to do. Some people, when you meet them, instantly seem like a certain name. Chris is especially good at figuring this out about people. We play that game sometimes when we are out and about. We’ll see people and try to guess what their name is. For example:

This guy’s name is Chuck or Randy.

Here’s Betty and Roger.

Tami. And she always puts a heart over the i.

You get the idea.

But how do you name someone who you have never seen, heard, or has not yet even developed a set of interests and hobbies? How do you name someone whose only communication with you has been a series of kicks and punches, but is more than likely going to be your favorite person on the planet? Someone who you will love more than life itself and will one day want to take a bullet for? Someone who will start out as a completely helpless ball of tissue and one day take care of you in your old age when you end up as a completely helpless ball of tissue? What about that person? How can you even begin to name a person with that much weight in your life?

Good question. We were kinda wondering that ourselves.

Some people have their sets of names already picked out before the baby even materializes. I know some girls who scribbled the names of all of their future children on their notebooks in high school. They have always known the names they wanted and all they needed was for a baby to come into the picture to actually attach name to. I myself had names I have always liked (Camille, Amelie, Madeline, etc) but either Chris didn’t like them, or I didn’t like them anymore, or too many people are naming their kids the same name. Our girl will be, after all, extraordinary, and if we give her a name everyone else is using like Madeline, or Emma or Ava, she will be just one of the pack. If we give her a name that we just make up by combining two names, like Adelina, Cameline, or Sarabella, it seems like we are trying a little too hard to be extraordinary. The trick is to be extraordinary without seeming like we are trying too hard (but if people knew how much time we have spent thinking about it, they would think we were conducting a worldwide names study).

So we collected our family trees to see if we could dig up a name from history that will be cool enough to suit our daughter. There’s a Betty, a Peggy, Victoria, Elizabeth, Jennifer, Mary, and a host of other names that are either too connected to a certain decade or just not what we had in mind. So we went to the last names. Sometimes last names make cool first names, and that will work great for when we have a boy, but none of them sounded right for this little girl. So what did we do? We got on the internet and looked through the list of every baby name there is. Chris found one he liked- Adelie. I still wasn’t sold. Then we did the next best thing we could think of- talk to our family about it.

People threw out names that they liked, but nothing seemed to fit. Every name just seemed either too common or too contrived. Then my 19 year old brother (I think as a joke) said, “What about Eloise?”. Something inside my head clicked on. Eloise… hmmm.. I like it. “What about Eloise?” It’s not a common name, but it’s not a name that we had just made up, either. It sounds classic, but not snobby. It’s kind of a wildcard name. I don’t know anyone named Eloise, so I don’t have any preconceived notions of what kind of person an Eloise is. But I liked the way it rolled off my tongue. I think I decided right away that Eloise was a perfect fit. Now I had to convince everyone else.

Chris didn’t like it at first. He thought it sounded like an old lady name. But I wasn’t going to back down so easily on this one. We talked about it a lot, and I forced him to say the name over and over to see if it went any better. Instead of saying the name the proper way, EL-o-weez, he was saying it as el-LOU-WEEZ . Once I corrected the error, he decided that he liked it a little better, but he was still not sold.  We told a few close friends that we were thinking about it, and everyone seemed to like it a lot. The turning point for him came thanks to Jennifer Anniston.

Love Happens

In Love Happens, Jennifer Anniston plays a floral designer named Eloise. She’s pretty, nice, and creative. She’s also a little quirky and not super-polished. I guess after seeing an Eloise that’s not a 90 year old woman, Chris could finally visualize the name on our little girl whom we’ve never officially met. It just seems right. Who knows if she’ll be an Eloise, Ellie, Elle, E-bee, or even Wheezy- but we’ll wait and let her decide that part of it after she actually starts life.

So that’s it. Our butterbean has a name- a pretty good one, if you ask me. But it is still tentative. What if she comes out looking NOTHING like an Eloise? What if she cries every time we call her by her name? In that case, we’ll rethink the process.

Until then, it’s Eloise.(EL-o-wheez)

And I can’t wait to meet her. Now all we have to do is find a middle name…maybe we should hit up Netflix?