oh goodness, another baby post?
tommy and i agonized for nine months on wren’s name. back and forth, terribly indecisive. one night in particular we spent two hours sitting on the floor at barnes and noble drinking coffee, pouring over baby name books. i’d ask him if he liked mabel, no way. what about luella? no. sable, alyssum, poppy, clementine? neve? it means snow, i love snow. no! i exhausted him. he had his picks too – amelie, finley, agnes, maryjo, kidding, i actually can’t remember. we went through hundreds and hundreds of names, always looking at the meaning, the origin, if it rhymed horribly with something else, never completely comfortable with anything. lists were made, at least four. we kept going back to wren though. the name had been on my mind for years before we even thought about starting a family. i love birds, obsessed kind of, and i loved the beautiful simplicity of the name, a little songbird – i dreamt of a little girl, blonde hair maybe, sweet and smiley like her dad, we’d call her wrennie. most likely she’d tell her school friends she hated her name because it’s not a kate, emily, or sam, but as she grew older secretly pleased with its uniqueness.
the moment i found out i was pregnant, i just knew it was a girl {though i had doubts for approximately two weeks stemming from fears of raising a girl – girls are dramatic, emotional, they become teenagers, ugh!}. on the way to the ultrasound we each took our guesses, he firm on a boy, me a girl. sure enough on the ultrasound screen a little girl waving her arm at us, and i thought to myself, there’s my wren, and cried a little but tommy didn’t notice. months went by, unsettled, always finding new names but continually returning to the first. at one point we sat on the couch reading baby names to her, joking, we asked my baby belly if wren would be her name, one poke for yes, two for no, and completely 100% truth, the hardest poke right next to my bellybutton popped visibly through my shirt. i don’t count that as anything other than coincidence, but it makes for a good story with plenty of eye rolling from the listener.
it wasn’t until a month before she was born, while shopping at anthropologie that we decided on her name. there was a basket of woodblock letters on sale, very few letters left, and figured now would be the time to decide on her name. sure enough there were all the letters for wren, and no ‘v’ for everlyse {her middle name and the other option for her first name}. so there it is, the story of wren’s name, decided by two of the most indecisive people on this planet. heaven help us with the next child. heaven is actually kind of a cute name…
