What's in a Name?

My midwife thought we might be tempting fate by naming our daughter Irene - after all Irene is a hurricane name.  If there is any truth to that, we are really taking chances

Hurricane Irene-Olivia   September 1971
Irene was its Atlantic name
Olivia was its Pacific name

There have been 6 named storms called Irene and she was actually referring to Hurricane Irene of 2011, which was bad enough to retire the name.  A good friend of mine named her son Andrew - even though she's from south Florida and for this area Andrew is the granddaddy of all hurricane names.  I don't really see that he reflects his parents' stormy name choice :)

So let's back up.  To me, naming a child is a very difficult task.  It seems like it would be easier if they came named so no one felt responsible!  For the first few months, I just pushed the issue out of my mind.  But as time went on and grew short, the search for a name began.

I always read a lot during pregnancy and I tend to get on an author jag.  One was Charles Dickens, one was Laura Ingalls Wilder.  This time it was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  I found Doyle very interesting - not terribly admirable except as a writer, but interesting nonetheless.  Doyle was a surgeon who was much more successful as a writer.  Although best known for his Sherlock Holmes stories, Doyle preferred to write historical fiction.  Some of the Sherlock Holmes stories interweave historical fiction with crime drama.  It is amazing to me that in spite of feeling trapped by Holmes, Doyle wrote an immense number of very entertaining stories about him.   I read two collections of short stories and all four of the Holmes novels.  I also read The Lost World, which is comparable with Jurassic Park.

Very few of the characters in any of Doyle's writings are women, and Sherlock Holmes in particular is very distrustful of women, but there is one women who outwits him and gains his respect - Irene Adler.  Choosing the name Irene is not really a nod to Doyle, but the name fit a lot of characteristics I was looking for - not too common, not including Ann, Anna, or Ana, not including -lie or -lee.  I like variety.

Additionally, the name Irene is a derivative of the Greek word for peace.  Just a day or so after I started stewing on Irene - and before suggesting it to Rob - I read Romans 12:28 - If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men.  Maybe it is the perspective of living in a house full of children, but the idea of encouraging peace among them seemed additional confirmation.

So expecting him to turn it down, I suggested the name to Rob...and he liked it!  

We moved on -  to me, Irene seemed to beg for a middle name, but most names we tried with it sounded better with Irene as the middle name.  I wanted to choose something modern to temper the "old lady" name we'd chosen.  One Sunday our pastor was talking about his wife (we've been attending a new church and I don't know his wife) and her name is Olivia.  Olivia is the 3rd most popular girl name for 2013 in the US - so it's trendy.  It's also old - Shakespeare used it.  And...it's a derivative of the word peace in Latin!

In the end, if she doesn't like it, she can always make up her own nick name.  Someone else in our family did!

Alright, would it really be a baby post without a baby picture?

I.O. with Sweet Lemy