Spin Cycle: No Regrets...

In honor of this week's Spin Cycle, I have a confession.

We named our daughter after our cat.

Our younger daughter that is.

Our older daughter's name was planned for years before her birth. She is Elizabeth (after my best friend of many years) Rose (after my birth month flower and the middle name of my father's sister Vivian), and always has been.

We had some trouble with Lilli.

See, we had boy names. We actually had two that we both agreed on. If Lilli had been our first born son, her name would have been William (the middle name of both grandfathers) Daniel (another family name) and we would have called her Will. I would like to pause here to point out that we picked a boy's name well before Pirates of the Caribbean, but I'm quite comfortable with stating that Orlando Bloom added to the appeal of the name. Anyway, while we had boy names for a number one and number two, we had no second girls name. I liked Isabelle, Olivia, Helen, Grace, Ivy, and many others. David did not. David liked Therese. I said that we aren't French. We both liked Catherine/Kathryn/Katherine/Cathryn, but we couldn't agree how to spell it.

We were getting down to the wire.

I kept trying to get David to go through the baby name books and make some suggestions (other than Therese), because I was tired of having all my names rejected. He'd look at one letter's entries every three days or so. Granted, I was pregnant, but it made me a little nuts.

Now, back story:

As I've mentioned before, we have three cats. As they came to us, we picked names that we liked enough to use regularly. Our first cat (of 8 years, she showed up the week before we were married) is Abby. She's a large fluffy Calico, and is the matriarch of the group and definitely the boss. Bailey was my birthday present the following year. He's a giant Tabby, with huge paws and a very high voice. Abby is a daddy's girl, Bailey is a Mama's boy. And then there's Lily, who came a couple years later. She was our baby. She came to us when she was 5 days old. We fed her around the clock, were the mama cats in every way, worried and fretted over her, and even flew her to Ohio for a visit with us when she was a couple weeks old. She thinks she's people, or maybe that we're cats.

So that's the back story.

Finally David got to the L's in the baby name book. As he was reading through them he said "Why did we use up some of the names we like on the cats?" I said, "We just liked them. We didn't know we were going have a hard time picking a baby name. Why? (Eagerly) Which one do you like?" "Lily", he said.

Welllllll, that got me excited, because obviously I like the name Lily too. We discussed how traumatized our daughter might be to realize someday that she is named after our cat baby, and agreed that her name would be Lillian so she can make up her own myth of how she was named, but we would still call her Lilli.

And so, we named our daughter for our cat. And we don't regret it in the slightest.

Oh, you want to know how she got her middle name? Well, tentatively she was Lillian Grace for a month or so. Grace, of course, was on my list, we thought it flowed nicely with our last name, and most importantly David didn't hate it. It didn't feel quite right though.

So when she was born we didn't choose Grace. We spent the entire day of her birth trying to figure it out. Since she was born at 4:44am it was a long day. We were getting pressured by the woman filing the birth certificate paperwork to get on it and pick one before she left for the day at 8. Down to the wire, and still remembering every moment of an un-medicated birth, I said "Well, I'm not having any more children, so let's name her after you. Her name is Lillian Spencer (David's middle name, and a family one)."

And so it is.

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Now head over to Sprite's Keeper and check out more parental confessions!