choosing baby name

One of the most difficult tasks you need to accomplish when you find out you’re pregnant is to come up with a name for the baby. We really all have so many personal reasons in deciding which name our child is going to have to honor the rest of her life. I mean, it’s a daunting task to get it right and make one of the first of many huge decisions on behalf of this other person.

The reason I’m up late thinking about this is because I was reading a discussion started by Mamapedia on the Million Moms Challenge community where she’s asking how and why we all picked our baby’s name. It was fun reading everyone’s responses and realizing that a lot of people still go the conventional route of naming their child after a family member, or even coming up with acronyms using the first couple of letters from the mom’s and grandmother’s names and combining them. Phew! So much into a name!

That all got me thinking that I’ve never shared with you how my husband and I came up with our daughter’s name: Camila. Well, I’ll take credit for “coming up” with it, of course!

The story is that my husband and I knew for a fact that we did not want to borrow any names from family members. Not because we wanted to be unconventional, but because we didn’t want the responsibility of choosing one abuela over the other, etc. Plus, I’m already named after my mother, Ana Lilian, and two is enough! Well, almost three…my mother, in an act of sheer genius (Ahem…) named my little sister Liliana, as in Ana Lilian reversed..get it?

Anyway…

We wanted a different name and the three rules we had  {aside from no familia names} were:

1.  We both must agree on it

2.  It needs to be easy to pronounce in both English and Spanish

3.  It can’t be any name that some wisecrack can figure out how to tangle around to make it funny or whatever

So, it wasn’t that easy.

During my sixth month of pregnancy we went to Mexico City for our last trip as a family of two. One of the first things I do when there is run to the bookstores. I found a novel by Marcela Serrano (I have to thank Roxana for my Marcela Serrano addiction!) titled Antigua Vida Mía. I immediately devoured all the pages in that book and fell in love with the main character, Camila. She was strong, she was passionate, she was adventurous.

There it was. My daughter’s name. I just knew it. It just had to pass the Dad test, and it did. He loved it immediately and since it had been the first name we had both immediately and without hesitation said yes to, we grabbed it.

And, that’s it, our baby name story.

What’s yours? Would really love to know!

 

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