naming children...

I am always interested in what people name their children and their reasons for choosing a particular name.

I really loved the name Jeneva (not Geneva) when I first heard it. When I was teaching 2nd grade, I had a student whose sister's name was Jeneva. Her mom told me that it meant 'Purity.' Very appropriate for our little girl we thought. We also found the meaning 'Juniper Tree.' At first that may seem like a strange meaning, but we embraced the idea of her name meaning a 'tree' or something that has 'roots'. We liked the visual that this meaning evokes and this is the verse that we chose for her. Her middle name is Rae, which is the same as mine.

Jeneva's name gets mispronounced by people who don't know her sometimes: Genevive, Geneva, Jennifer. She's gotten good at saying very firmly: "it's jen-i-VUH". She'll probably always have to pronounce it and spell it for people. She told me yesterday that she likes her name because no one else has it. That is also one of the reasons I love it as well, but of course would be happy if someone else chose it for their little girl too. :)

Choosing our boy's name was more difficult. Steve and I went back and forth with several different names and we never seemed to agree. Even on the morning that I was scheduled to be induced we were on the internet frantically looking at boys names and trying to have a list of options we agreed on. We chose not to find out the gender of either of our children before delivery. We had our girls name picked out. It was going to be Josie. The baby was going to be born on Steve's grandma Josie's birthday. How appropriate if it were a girl. We were uncertain on a middle name though for a girl.

So, about our boy names, we still hadn't chosen one that we agreed on. Jude was at the top of Steve's list. Isaiah and Levi were at the top of mine. Jude was following in 3rd place for me. He was born at 7:30 the evening of November 1. We still didn't have a name for him until the next day in the afternoon. Jude Isaiah. I fell in love with it. I knew he would get a lot of 'Hey Jude' in reference to the Beatles song, but I didn't care. Jude means 'Praise and Thanks.' Isaiah means 'God is Salvation'. You certainly can't go wrong with those meanings! We weren't intentionally choosing Biblical names, those just happened to be the ones that we were drawn to. I also loved the way his name looked on paper. It just flowed well. I'm weird about stuff like that I guess.

Our ideas for boy middle names were: William (Steve's Dad), Harold (my dad....though we didn't really consider this one because, well, Harold?!? Love ya dad:) John (Steve's middle name and my grandpa's name, but sounds strange with Jude) Lambert (Steve's grandpa, Josie's husband....this is a rather odd name too though). We decided to skip the 'family' names and just choose what we liked.

Some people have asked if all of our children's names will begin with a J. Probably not. It wasn't intentional.

Around the same time that Jude was born there was another baby born from our church with the name Judah. Very similar.

This is even more ironic. On Sunday I was working as a Childcare Coordinator at our church in the nurseries. I used to do this every Sunday, but quit a couple of years ago when Steve was gone over a 6 month period for the National Guard. Now I fill in for other staff every once in awhile. So, Sunday I was filling in for Andrea who is on maternity leave. I was helping babies get checked in to Nursery 1 (0-12 months). I noticed a mom whom I had never seen before put her child's name tag on that said 'Jude.' Excitedly, I said, "oh, my son's name is Jude too!" She asked if his middle name was Isaiah? "Yes! How did you know?" She told me that her son's name was Jude Isaiah too and she had seen my son's name on the list of children getting dedicated a few months back and was shocked when she saw the exact same name as her son. Now a name like 'Jennifer Lynn' or 'Stephen John' or something more common like that wouldn't be too shocking, but the combination of 'Jude Isaiah' seemed very ironic!

I was congratulating another woman yesterday who just had her 5th son. They named him Levi. I told her that had been one of our options for boy names. She told me that they had a difficult time deciding between the names Jude and Levi for their son too. There must be a trend to certain names.

One day Jude was in our church nursery with four other boys whose names were Noah, Micah, Jonah, and Abraham. I believe maybe Biblical names are a trend now. Especially in Christian circles, but not necessarily.

Any thoughts?