How we came to a name

Look at my precious babe!! Reagan will be one-month old tomorrow, so in honor of her first milestone, I'm going to tell you about how we found her name...

The journey to finding Reagan's name was ... well, a lot harder than I EVER thought naming a child would be. I have always been the type that doodles names (see here for an embarrassing story about my doodling habits..and don't worry, I ended up marrying the guy, so it's all good). Before I got married, I would constantly doodle my name with different last names, but after Brooks and I got hitched, I naturally moved on to doodling baby names. There were about 10 names which I thought "I would name a kid this in a second!" and Brooks agreed with most of them....

and then we got pregnant.

All the names that we had previously 'loved' were now thrown in the trash. It wasn't just a hypothetical idea anymore -- we needed to name an actual human being!! Someone who was going to grow up, go to school, write her name on papers, have job interviews, have a boy say "(blank) will you marry me?", etc. etc. 

Basically, she needed to have an awesome name. 

We fiddled around with a TON of names for weeks, and weeks, and weeks. Our conversations would go something like this:

Me: Katelyn?

Brooks: No, that is totally 1985, how about Madalyn?

Me: No.

Brooks: Why?

Me: Because everyone will call her Mady, and if she's fat, they'll call her fatty Mady.

Brooks: Oh, true

There was always some weird reason for not liking a certain name -- and if it didn't meet our main 5 criteria, then it was out!

~ NAME CRITERIA ~

1. Name cannot rhyme with something that will cause child to be made fun of. 

2. No nickname-names

(this means that we didn't want the name to have an easily accessible nickname that, over time, would become the name. Like me, for example. My name is Jenalee, but no one has ever called me by my real name because ever since I was two months old, I had already been coined 'Jena'. I had a hard time with it growing up because people always said or spelled it wrong since it didn't have to 'n's. My mom always says she would have spelled it differently if she would have known that I would never go by Jenalee. It's not a bad thing to have a nickname-name, especially if the parents plan it, but I just didn't want it for our baby. To each their own!)

3. Name has to be somewhat modern, but not too weird

4. Name cannot end in 'er' because of our last name. However, exceptions may apply

5. No names of ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends or anyone who was related to said ex's in any way.

You can see why finding a name became difficult. To say we were picky would be an understatement. However, after much deliberation, we did decide on a few names over the course of my pregnancy. When I was around 28 weeks, we decided on the name Kenley. It was in the bag. Done, finito! When we started telling people the name, we got some mixed responses. Some liked it, and some didn't, but most people would say it wrong like this:

"Oh Kinley?"

"no, Kenley -- with an 'en' sound, not an 'in' sound"

It got to the point where at least 90% of the people we told would say it wrong. It was a trial run that failed, so we added a sixth criteria.

6. When child says their name, people should be able to understand it enough to repeat it back correctly.

So with that, Kenley was out.

By this time, I was about 33 weeks along. We needed a dang name. One day while driving, Brooks mentioned that he liked the name Scarlett. I had LOVED that name earlier in the pregnancy, but he hadn't been a fan. Once I saw his change of heart, I jumped on it! Scarlett was the name, wahoo! We were pretty stoked about it for a few weeks, but then things started to feel a bit iffy. My little brother just HAD to mention to us one night that it rhymed with Harlot. 

Great. Our child, the prostitute.

Scarlett wasn't going to fly, so we were back at square one again. It wasn't until I was 37 weeks that fortune finally smiled upon us. Brooks decided, as a last resort, to go through every name in the online baby name database. For about three hours, he said name, after name, after name. Finally, around #1800, he said "Reagan". He was about to move on to the next name when I stopped him.

"wait honey...I think I like that one"

Technically we had talked about the name Reagan about three or four months earlier, but it didn't stand out to me then like it did right at that moment. It was like lightning. I knew that Reagan was the name. Brooks liked it a lot too, but with my ever-changing mind, he didn't want to jump too fast on the name wagon for fear that I would make us jump off (for the third time). For the next few days, he would ask me if I still liked it, and I always answered yes. We didn't want to tell anyone (or blog about it) because we wanted to just fall in love with it before anyone gave us their opinions. Good opinions are great, but negative ones totally put a bad taste in your mouth when you're trying to decide on a name.

 Finally, just 2 weeks shy of my due date, we for-reals, officially decided on Reagan Beth Burr. We played with the spelling a bit at first because it worried me that people would think that her name was pronounced "Re-gun" (...which is ugly and unfeminine) instead of "Rae-gun", but we agreed that doing a 'common spelling' rather than a 'phonetic spelling' would be better, so R-e-a-g-a-n was the winner! Her middle name, Beth, serves three special purposes. Firstly, it's after my grandma Beth, who we look up to so much. Second, it's after Bethany, Brooks' sister, who we love dearly. Thirdly, it's a small homage to my sweet Emilee Beth, who I know is Reagan's guardian angel. 

So that's how we came to the name. We love it, and her so much!!