Friday, May 15, 2009

baby naming...

So, I'm wondering: why did you choose the specific names that you did for your children? I was surfing the other day and ended up at this article on Wired.com. I found it very interesting. Partly because of our ancestral heritage and partly because Scandinavian names are just downright cool. Chad and I knew we wanted Scandinavian/Germanic for our children. In the back of our minds we knew the names couldn't be "popular" (at least in the top 100 of those yearly lists), and couldn't be "invented". So here's the scoop on our girls' names:

Ingrid Anne - In Norse, Ingrid means a meadow. We also read where it means, hero's daughter or beautiful daughter. Anne is English for gracious.

Ilsa Ruth- Originally a pet form of Elizabeth (Liz), which means consecrated to God. Ruth is Hebrew for friendship.

After Ilsa was born, a good friend of ours quipped that Ingrid Bergman played "Ilsa" in Casablanca. This never occurred to us when we picked the names, but it's kind of cool. (Click on the picture to visit imdb.com for more wonderful photos from Casablanca.)

I'd love to hear your naming philosophy and stories.

8 comments:

Esquire's Wife said...

Fun post! I am going to copy you and post one on my blog. You have started a trend! You have always been a trendsetter, though! ;)

Joy said...

I have two girls named Paige Victoria and Leah Grace. We really didn't name them after anyone in our families. We too did not want common, popular names either. I'm real happy with the names we chose. I picked up a names book at the library called "Beyond Jennifer and Jason". It talks about popular name, but it also focuses on how names are perceived.
I love your girl's names. Very pretty.

Joy

Yarnjeannie said...

My first son's name came from "Danny's Song" which I heard on the radio over and over while I was pregnant. It was the Anne Murray version. I was sure I was having a boy, and loved that song. Daniel's middle name is Wallace - after his paternal great-grandfather, who passed away the year Dan was born. He's not crazy about the middle name...

My second son Tom wasn't named until he was handed to me in the hospital. He looked like a Thomas and his middle name is his father's name - Wayne.

My "baby" graduated college today!

matt n karisa said...

Mattaya's name took a while. Matt and I couldn't decide because the names we had chosen didn't seem to suit her. Exasperated, the hospital staff brought us several baby name books and told us to please hurry up and choose (it was day 2, and they wanted to finish the birth certificate). A few months earlier we had looked through family histories to see if there was anything we liked. I saw "Mathea" (Scandinavian) and interpretted it as "Matthea" (Hebrew & Hispanic). At the time, Matt hadn't liked it. However, after she was born, I LOVED it for her, and Matt came around. She is, in fact, named for her dad as "Mattaya" is a female derivative of "Matthew" (both meaning "gift from God"). We chose an alternate spelling (over Matthea and Mattea) because we thought we'd run into FEWER problems with mispronunciation and mispelling...but people seem to want to pronounce it muh-tie-uh (sigh) and spell it Mattea (who woulda guessed?). We've never regretted it, and it suits her very well. Her middle name is Breann. My mother's middle name and mine is Ann, but I didn't like the sound of Mattaya Ann. As I flipped through the books, I noted that Breann not only contained "Ann" but also meant "strong (which she certainly had proved to be), virtuous (which we certainly hope she will be)".

Now naming her sister is going to be quite a task.... ;) We want something fairly unique and meaningful and having family ties so that it will be just as special as Mattaya's. We're open to suggestions!

Stacy said...

Let see...with Kayla (meaning Pure) we chose her first name because to be honest it was the only name we could agree on! Her middle name Marie was easy because that was Adam's Great Grandma's name. For Carter (which means either one who transports things or troublemaker-which is so true!) we were messing around looking at the baby name book the night before my ultrasound and I happened to read the name out loud and Adam was sold! His middle name is Frederick which is also a family name. My Adam was named after the first Adam in his family who brought the family from Germany and Frederick was that Adam's son who is my Adam's Great Great Grandfather (does that make sense?) so we thought it was fitting to use for our son's name.

The trouble now is, if we decide to have more kids do we use another C or K name so they all sound the same?

stephanie j. said...

GREAT stories! I'm enjoying this post so much. Thanks everyone! Keep 'em coming...

stephanie j. said...

Congrats on the graduate, Yarnjeannie!

Joy said...

I loved this idea so much that I did a similar post today. You are a trendsetter. :)

Joy

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