We're Going to Call Her...

There's probably nothing more terrifying and hilarious then to overhear you almost 3-year-old daughter exclaim this to your mother on the phone. That being said this is almost word for word a conversation that my mother and my daughter had on the phone.

All that aside, it's been a long winding road trying to find the name for my second daughter, who's on her way in January. The selection of her name actually started with a joke that my wife played on my niece Rebecca, who is a die-hard Steelers fan in Baltimore, which isn't easy, considering the rivalry between the two teams. To aggravate Rebecca, Jill told her that we were going to name the baby Raven. I told her that she shouldn't joke about that, because I actually liked the name. Not necessarily for the football team. I was going more of a comic book/Edgar Allan Poe route.

After Raven made the list, we also went through and picked few other names that were top contenders. Willow, Olive, Scarlett, and Leslie all made the list. I'm sure that we both like Willow because of the character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, one of our mutual favorite shows. Olive, in hindsite, more than likely came from the character on Pushing Daisies, and Scarlett comes from Gone with the Wind for Jill, and G.I.Joe for me. And Leslie is my first name, and my Dad's middle name, so that would have been sort of a legacy thing. In fact Dad suggested that if we went with Leslie that we took Jill's middle name to give to the child, so it was like a mix of the two names. I kind of thought that was cool, but Jill wanted her to have her own identity, which is also understandable, so that idea quickly got scrapped.

Eventually we came back around to Raven and added the middle name Elisabeth, which I'm proud to say that I came up with. Our whole family liked the name, including Lilly, who's been very picky. However, once the name got as far as the Grandparents on either side, much resistance was met. Mainly they were upset that it wasn't a more traditional name. The thing that they missed was the fact that the baby probably wasn't going to have a traditional name anyway. It's a side effect of having a comic-geek and a teacher trying to name a kid.

Anyway, fate of the name Raven was sealed when a woman at church suggested that whether we wanted it or not, her name would be associated with the football team, and as much as my family likes the team, I don't want my child forever associated with it. So we started looking elsewhere for names, and for some reason we went totally off the list. The next name we landed on was Emily Rachel which in hindsight I found pretty funny being that the name is associated with two women that Ross both dated and subsequently married on Friends. Not to mention the fact that Ross called Emily, Rachel at their wedding. That name stuck for about a week. Just long enough for Jill to start telling people, and then we moved on again.

The next name I pulled out of the ether was Ashley Jean, which more than likely had a round-about link to Ashley J. Williams from Evil Dead/Army of Darkness. And Jean is Jill's Mom's name. There is probably a lot more going on with that name (on a subconscious level) then I care to admit, but that one had an even shorter stay than Emily Rachel.

Which ultimately brought us back around to the original list, and our original middle name. So after much back and forth and more than a little stress, we've landed on Willow Elizabeth, which still isn't terribly popular with the grandparents, but it's not their kid, so they can deal with it. What makes this amusing to me now is that since we call Lilly, Lilly and not Lillian, someone might thing that Jill and I just have a thing for Alyson Hannigan (which probably isn't wrong on some level) since both of our kids will be named after (or similarly to) characters that she's made popular.