Preemie Life - Day 14

A name.  Those little words by which we are called.  As a parent there are few choices to be made that cause me as much anxiety.  Of all the gifts I give to my child this is one that they will carry with them from beginning to end, and beyond and that knowledge weighs me down.  I wonder, will they like the name?  Will they think it is to common?  Will they think it is too weird?  Will the mean kids in school be to easy to turn it into a taunt...it's enough to stress any parent out, even under normal circumstances.  Unfortunately these were not normal circumstances.  We chose not to find the gender of our baby out until birth because we find that exceptionally fun, but we counted on having an extra two months to talk about names.  I personally was fairly sure the baby was a boy and when it became obvious baby's birth was eminent I told Dr. J we should name the baby Chase as a reference to it's race to get here.  And then the baby wasn't a boy.  And so the great name game began.  The day after the baby was born the kids came up with Harriet Potter and Cheetah.  Since all our children have a blog name we decided to keep Cheetah.  It gave us something to call baby girl on this site and it gave the nurses something to laugh about.  They made this sign and have gotten a good laugh out of the amount of people who walk into NICU and think we actually named our baby this.  You'd be surprised by some of the crazy names that come through this NICU.  A couple of days later we still didn't have a name and Gigi's pre-k class came up with a list for us:

Sticky
Flower
Kayla
Maddy
Rosie
Ava
Island
Sally
Pixie
Claire

I put together a list, petitioned my friends and family for help, and on one odd night when Dr. J and I managed to spend a few hours together we put together an extensive list of close to 40 names, and still none of the names felt right.  Here's a sample in case you're looking for some good girl names: Eliana, Lyndi, Lyn, Brynn, Genesis, Gwen, Adia, Celia, Reyna, Celeste, Evangeline, Daia, Nadia, Thalia, Lana, Eysia, Evie, Edie, Elsie, Eve, Ada, Alesix, Ali, Isabella, Jessie, Rosalyn, Annette, Necie, Josie, Nia, Rae, Lelanie, etc.  We spent so much time on namevoyager I started thinking we should buy a subscription.  (Speaking of namevoyager...my favorite baby naming site.  Totally love it.  I think every soon to be parent should check it out!)  Every day I'd go to NICU and the nurses would ask me if we had a name yet.  Every night my mother-in-law would ask.  We'd go to church, school, preschool, out with friends and the question was always the same.  It felt like everyday we delayed the pressure became even greater and the list felt even more wrong.  And then two nights ago I came home from Young Women's and when I climbed into bed next to Dr. J I woke him up enough that he pulled out the laptop.  We started looking at names we had absolutely no intention of using, and the names associated with them, and then we found our name.  We said it a few times, and started to laugh.  We knew it was the name, but it felt weird to have settled so easily.  We decided to sleep on it.  Both of us woke up ready to proceed.  And so we had a name for our little darling Cheetah.  It is exceptionally unusual, at least in this part of the world, so much so that my mother-in-law asked if we made it up.  I assure you that we didn't.  And while it is far from the top one hundred list we think it is exceptionally beautiful, it pays homage to a family member, it has a nice meaning, and there is a middle name that the other children adore.  We are quite happy with it and relieved we came upon a name before Cheetah was ready to leave the hospital.   Because we keep our kids names off the blog, I'm only going to post it on Facebook but if you aren't there, and would really like to hear it feel free to e-mail me at witchychica@gmail.com and I'll share the name with you.