love is blonde

Longtime readers and real life friends know how much I love the baby name game. See this post here and this one here. So it’s safe to say that getting pregnant and being able to name OUR BABY was kind of exciting. Except that it was also kind of difficult!

We found out the baby was a boy at the end of the first trimester, so we didn’t really spend any time thinking of girl names. Andrew diligently read through the Baby Name Wizard (and my heart melted) and drafted his short list of boy names to me: Henry, Archer, Holden, Peyton, and Matthias. I never really made a short list (there was one name I liked a lot from the beginning, but we may use it for Baby #2 someday so I’ll keep it secret for now), but I pretty much rejected his whole list for various reasons. And then, we were stuck.

Andrew swears that he first thought of the name Miller, but I have a hunch I was the one to first bring it up. I don’t even know where either of us got the idea, or when. But it was one day sometime early in the second trimester that one of us casually mentioned it, and both of us together went, “Huh, I like that. Let’s put it on the list.”

So the name Miller got added to the very short list, and started to grow on us. We liked that it was uncommon, yet easy to spell and pronounce. We started bouncing the idea off a few friends and family members and my mom liked it and my father-in-law said it was “pretty cool,” thereby passing the grandparent test. I also wrote to Swistle Baby Names to ask her opinion and felt encouraged by the comments there. But we still had months to go before he was born, and didn’t feel rushed to make a final decision anytime soon. I just kept calling him “the baby” (and still often do).

Middle names were even more tricky. Andrew wanted the baby to have a middle name beginning with the letter H, because he and his dad both have H middle names. I, being somewhat persnickety, argued that our baby was already getting his and his father’s last name, and that was plenty enough, and blah blah to hell with the patriarchy (or something like that).

On our various travels this summer, we spent a lot of time tossing around middle names. James, Henry, Daniel, Sebastian, Anderson, I don’t even remember them all. In one of those conversations I suggested Everett, and although Andrew didn’t like it much initially, it stuck in both of our minds.

Fast forward to when we knew our son would be born within a few hours and we had to quickly pick a name. This is a moment I’ll never forget. I remember sitting in the hospital room in tears, and Andrew said to me, “…and his name is Miller.” And as soon as the words left his mouth, I knew he was exactly right. Sure, we could have “saved” the name for another baby, but in our hearts THIS baby’s name was Miller.

I told Andrew he could choose one of his favorite names for the middle name, but he suggested Everett. It just sounded right, and we could always use an H middle name for future kiddos. Neither name has any connection to family, or any particular meaning. We simply liked them both.

Right before I was wheeled into surgery, the nurse asked us if the baby had a name, and that was the first time we said it aloud to anyone else. Miller Everett. In a day where almost nothing went right, we felt right about this from the moment we named him.

I’m of course so sad that Miller will never grow up to be a toddler Miller, a kindergartner Miller, a teenage Miller, or an adult Miller. I wish so hard he could grow up with his name. He will always just be baby Miller. But we love his name, and are so happy that we were able to give it to him, and that we will have a least a few happy feelings when we think back to the day he was born.