What's in a name?

The younger kids' primary teachers have asked for us to send in a little note explaining how they each got their names and where they come from. I thought I'd type every child's up here and then maybe I might remember to print it out and send it to church with them as part of their lesson next week.


For Nathan's name we came up with several. We liked Christian a lot. We had actually settled on Crispin Tate and then, my sister, Juli, chimed in with "Oh! We can call him crispin tater tots!" And the name was instantly killed. We decided we wanted to go with a family name. Nathan is huge on my side of the family. We have lots of Nathans or Nathaniels in our family history on my paternal line and we decided that we really liked Nathan; his middle name is Aaron after his father. We thought it flowed nicely too, because Aaron's full name is Jason Aaron--Nathan Aaron seemed to flow well. I don't know what other people think about the names we came up with, but I always wanted to make sure the names "sounded right" to me. And these sounded right and they are family names.

Kielle's name comes from a great great great great great great grandmother on Aaron's maternal line. Her name was Kiele Mortensen? (I can't find her baby book right now and the family history book is buried in a box so we'll go with my memory for now--which could spell trouble, but here we are.) I knew I wanted a daughter named Annie and all of my girls were going to get middle names because I didn't have one and always wished that I had. So as we were searching for a name for our daughter we went through all the family history books and I was reading through every girls name. As I read Kiele, Aaron said "That's it" He fell in love with the name instantly. I was planning on spelling it just like we had found it, but Aaron wanted to add an extra "l" to make it look more feminine, so we came up with Kielle Anne. She has been called both Kielle and Annie since the day she was born. In fact she actually thought that her middle name was Annie until she was about 6.

Both Aaron and I have Great Aunt Adas and I have always loved the name. I love to say it- Ada, Ada, Ada. We thought long and hard on her middle name and the name that sounded the best and fit so perfectly was Bryn which is the name of my best friend since high school, and who still remains my dear and cherished friend. I can't remember if I called her and asked permission to use her name or not, because you're not supposed to name after the living as we learn in the amazing movie "Avalon" (Go watch it now, if you haven't seen it.)

We just liked the name Ryan. I had heard it around and I just really liked it! We worked on names we thought would flow well with Ryan and we came up with Alexander. As far as we knew, these were not family names, we simply liked them! After Ryan was born, my Grandma Petersen told us that she had a brother, who was the fourth child-like Ryan, named Ivan Alexander! I thought that was soo cool that we had chosen a name so close to my great uncle without even knowing it and that they were both the 4th children. Pretty cool!

Lastly came Tessa. With her, I knew our family was supposed to be completed with a little girl and I knew that her name should be Elise. Every name we came up with as a middle name just never seemed to work. Elise always sounded better as a middle name. The name Elise come from my maternal line--Elise Christensen. I read a story about her and was impressed with the type of woman she was and I loved the name. I struggled with making Elise her middle name even though three of the dearest people in my life go by their middle name (namely Aaron, Bryn and Ximen.) So Aaron assured me that we could give her a different first name and then call her by her middle name. I believed it could be done. I continued trying to come up with the right name and narrowed it down to two, Elise McKenna and Tessa Elise. As soon as I presented these two options to Aaron, he instantly latched onto Tessa. It is a name he has always loved. Right before she was born, or maybe right after--during the hospital stay I brought up the 2 options again and he had no recollection of me bringing up Elise McKenna and he really liked it too. So we briefly considered naming her Tessa Elise McKenna (and actually on occasion call her that) but we decided that one middle name would be enough. My assurances that she would be called by her middle name disappeared. From the time she was born, Aaron and the kids called her Tessa, I called her Elise and my sisters and sister-in-law, Teresa, called her Elise too because they knew that was what I wanted to call her. But it just didn't stick and finally I had to admit that she really wasn't an Elise--She is Tessa!