What's in a name

I have been meaning to write a post about the names we chose for our baby, since people often ask, and it's not too complicated of a story.

The name "Willa" has been in my heart since 2004, when I first started participating in the Salvation Army Angel program at Christmas, wherein you select a paper ornament with a less fortunate child's name and information and buy gifts for them.  I chose the one I did that year because her name was "Willa."  I had never heard that name before, and liked that it was short and sweet.  I have always liked short girls' names that end in "a," and added it to my list of future children's names, along with Emma and  Olivia.  Cut to ten years later, and Emma and Olivia are both in the top five of popular girls' names.  Witnessing the flood of "Jennifer"s and "Ashley"s in my childhood having to come up with creative alternatives or forever use their last initial, I decided I didn't want that for my daughter and crossed the latter two off the list.  But Willa was still cute and relatively unknown.  I also never had a client with that name, nor had I seen it used for a fictional character that was so well known that it would forever be tied to the name (try naming your kid "Penny" without picturing the woman from Big Bang Theory, or "Elaine" without harking back to the 90s).  Luckily, Jeremy liked it.  So, Willa it was!

As for her middle name, we knew we wanted to honor family somehow.  The three names we were considering were "Eve," like me and my mom, "Lois," to honor my paternal grandmother, and "Katherine," to honor Jeremy's sister, as he always wanted to do.  I flipped back and forth a lot, since I always wanted my daughter to have "Eve" as her middle name, but both Jeremy and I agreed that it didn't go with "Willa" very well.  Neither did "Lois," on account of all the "ehl" sounds.  Katherine also didn't seem to work super well, since "Willa Katherine" sounds like we are naming her after the author Willa Cather, and while I like her work, I didn't want people to think I liked it THAT much.  So, in a flash of inspiration early on, I thought it would be great to shorten it to "Kate."  Jeremy liked it because he is the only one that really calls his sister "Kate," and I liked it both for that reason, and because her intials would be "WKF," like mine are "GKF."  She wouldn't be a "Klein," but she would have that small detail.  Sold!

We didn't tell people what it was, or even fill it out on the application for a birth certificate before she was born, just in case something changed in the last minute, like if someone else used the name or we got sick of it.  But neither of those things happened, so it stuck.

I think it fits her quite well, if I do say so myself :-).