What's in a name?

I did this post with Barrett and because I always get asked the question of how we came up with the names of our kids, I thought I would repeat. I'm always interested in hearing how others decide on names too.

I'll start with a few years back after B was born, I started a name list on my phone. Anytime I would hear something I liked, I would add it in. I would reference it occasionally and deleted many along the way as well. I knew I wanted to stick with the surname "theme" with any potential siblings and was always attracted to those types of names. The girl name list was small, maybe only a handful, while my boy list was like 20 names long. I also had a few gender neutral names that could go either way.

I only had one real criteria and it was the same as when naming Barrett. It couldn't start with a J, T or B. I wanted to be sure that all of us in the family had different initials. Why? I don't know. It's just something I wanted to stick with. That left plenty of letters to choose from though.

Also, her name could not be the same as someone I knew in person. Ideally, it was a name that I had never heard used before at all like was the case with Barrett. There are obviously other Barrett's in the world (it's ranked 500s or something on social security name list) but we have never met anyone else with that name. That was the goal with Baby #2.

Finally, I wanted a name that was uncommon but still obviously a real name. Nothing youneek so to speak and it was important to me that it was easily spelled. Tissiere is not an easy last name to have so we need to be kinder to our kids in the first name category, in my opinion.

Holland: I originally added this to my list pretty early on the pregnancy. One night I was googling and found a website with a list of last names used as first names. It took me a few days to go through it but I did each letter individually and added any to my phone list that I liked. Holland was one of them and it pretty quickly became a four runner in my mind. I mentioned it to Joe as one of my winners but he said something along the lines of the baby for sure being a boy so it was moot. When we found out she was a girl, I was pretty strongly pushing for it. We didn't have any set discussion to talk about our name options but I would bring it up occasionally as how in my eyes she was a Holland. Joe couldn't come up with any names that could beat it. It took maybe 3 more months for us to officially decide on hers as a winner.

Jo: I got dibs on the middle name for Barrett (which I chose as Robert after my Dad). This was big for Joe because he is the 4th generation Joseph and was potentially our only son to continue on that tradition. It was pretty set that Joe would have the choice of middle names this time around. If it was a boy, it would have been Joseph. When we found out she was a girl, Joe was pretty much set on Josephine because he didn't think there was any other options that honored the name Joseph. I was not a super fan of Josephine. It's a fine name but just not my pick. I very quickly started to pull for Jo especially since it is really what he goes by rather than Joseph. Heck, I think his drivers license even says Joe. In the end, he would have gotten final pick and luckily, he saw the light and decided to go with Jo.

That's how Holland Jo came to be. :)