I was tagged

I'll start this post out with the reason behind the title! We were tagged by our cousins in Illinois, Sarah and Jeff. http://normalsarahandjeff.blogspot.com/ We were tagged to share the story behind how we chose our daughters name. I loved reading about how they picked the name for their daughter, and thought it would be fun to "play" along...so here it goes.

When we found out we were expecting, we immediately started thinking of names. We wanted to use a family name as well as try to find something biblical. Before we found out the sex of our child, we picked out both a girls name and a boys name. Mary Elizabeth was picked for a girl, and Joshua Alan was picked if it was a boy. Mary is a family name on both sides of our family. My grandmothers name is Mary (Louise), Judes grandmothers name was also Mary (Rose). Jude also has a great aunt named Mary, and I found out (after naming our daughter) that my Pap Martin's grandmothers name was Mary Elizabeth. And obviously, Mary and Elizabeth are both biblical names, so it just fit perfect.

Had we had a boy, Joshua Alan was picked because of the initials. We wanted our boy to have the same initials as Jude, so that anything Jude had with his initials on, could have been passed down to him. We liked the name Joshua (didn't want to use a name that was already used in his immediate family) and Alan would have been after his great uncle Bud (real name being Alan Draper)

When we were expecting our second child, we knew the boys name we picked would still be our original choice, but we really liked the name Sarah for a girl. Sarah is biblical and it was Jude's other grandmothers name as well as Jude's cousin. We picked Elaine after my great aunt Elaine. I just always thought it was such a pretty name, and it went well with Sarah.

Another thing we thought about in naming our children was we didn't want "extremely unique" names, but we also didn't want over-popular names. Mary was a bit of an old fashion name, and Sarah used to be popular, but isn't so much now.

We couldn't imagine having other than our Mary and Sarah...their names are just PERFECT for them. And if you haven't picked up on it, their nicknames are Boo and Bee (respectively). Boo was given to Mary by Jude right after she was born, he sang a little lullaby to her all the time and it was about his Gabba-BOO. Sarah was called Sarah Bear for a long time, but Mary one day shortened bear to B and it just stuck...for a while she would even tell people her name was Bee Elaine.

Thanks for tagging us Sarah (our cousin) and now I will tag RITA and LAURA. If any of my "followers" would like to play along, they can leave their reason for picking certain names in the comment section. (and Dad feel free to include how I was named)