What is in a name?

I just read an article on Still Standing and I wanted to share my baby naming experience too.

Giving my children their names was a job I took great care with. It is such a responsibility to give a person a name don't you think? I searched high and low for their potential names. Movie credits, novels, baby name books, friends suggestions. You name it. I even bought a little note book and wrote our favourite names out in full, including the surname to see how it looked. Our daughters have a rather difficult hyphenated last name that is both quite ridiculous and wonderful at the same time, so a first name has to be very special indeed. Names was one of the first things I started looking at once I was pregnant, I knew it would take a long time to find the right ones.

Cordelia's name written out while pregnant, art work care of W!

I am very much of the school of thought that my babies would not be named until we met them face to face. I feel I need to see them first to see what name would suit them best. I gather that typically here in Switzerland you already have your name selected before birth and provide the hospital with your boy/girl name once you arrive to deliver your baby, I remember arriving at the hospital in labour with Wren and being worried the hospital were going to force us to name our baby before we had met her but fortunately that was not the case although I do remember they wanted a name quite quickly from us after she was born, and so she was named just a few minutes later. We knew right away after seeing her what her name should be.

Wren Lucille.

Wren, it turns out is the perfect name for her, she is a small child with a beautiful albeit loud voice, just like the bird. I had found the name Wren in a novel I had read years ago and held it close to my heart. My husband loved the name Lucille and there we have it! The prefect name for her.

During the first half of my pregnancy with Cordelia, we did not know she was a girl so we carried on adding beautiful girl names to our ever increasing list of girl names and continued to struggle with boy names again. When we found out from all the testing that we were having another girl I was relieved to stop searching for elusive boy names.

Cordelia was on the list of names in our first pregnancy and while I wanted to give this new baby a list all of her very own, I just had to carry that name over because I loved it so much. When I fell in love with the name years ago I did not know it was my grandmothers middle name, it was only later that I found that out. We loved the name Rae too, not only because it was a family name as well (my husbands mothers middle name as well as her father's first name) but because it just sounds so pretty.

Rae.

It makes me think of sunshine.

I loved the 2 names together, a long and a short. It has a nice flow to it. Throughout the rest of my pregnancy I continued to look for names just in case but I remember saying to my husband that I really loved the name Cordelia Rae. We both loved it but as we had done the first time around we decided to wait to meet her until we bestowed a name upon her.

Cordelia also had a very special place in my heart because of its meaning. The name Cordelia comes from two sources: Latin and Irish. In Latin, the root of the name is "cor," meaning "heart" and the name may possibly come from the French phrase coeur de lion, "heart of the lion."

Heart of a lion! What a fitting name for our baby we knew would need a strong name to help her through her health problems. It just seemed like it was meant to be.

Of course Cordelia's birth came so unexpectedly and with me being under a general anaesthetic our naming process was very different to Wren's. By the time I woke up my husband and Wren had already seen the baby and spent a small amount of time with her in the neo unit. I only got to see a picture of her at that point but she was beautiful. My husband asked about a name. I remember saying it has to be Cordelia Rae. It was the most perfect name for her.

Our little lion heart.

And so she was named.

Without me actually seeing her in person or even holding her.

I am sad that we don't get to hear her name very often and see it written down even less so. It is such a beautiful name and so much thought went into finding it for her. I am sad that her beautiful name invokes sadness and silence when I want to shout it from the roof tops, I want to call her in for her dinner, I want to use her full name when she is in trouble, I want to fill her name out on play group lists, I want to say her name everyday and get a reaction of of what a pretty name instead of awkward silences and downward glances.

I want to say it out loud for her.

Cordelia Rae.