Usually when I tell someone that our daughter's name is Monica - Monica Joan - we get the question, why did you pick Monica? No one really asks about her middle name because both of our mom's are named Joan so that part is easy to figure out. It's her first name that makes people curious. Honestly, sometimes I'm curious too!
When we found out we were pregnant, we immediately started discussing name ideas. Boy names were easy for us; we already know the first name for our first boy. But girl names were different. We both liked different names - and I have a tendency to prefer names that are a little more unique than not.
So after talking about names for a few weeks, we pretty much just decided to wait until we found out the baby's gender to decide what we liked. At our January 7th, 2016 appointment the doctor told us we were having a girl! So we had a gender reveal party with our families: we made them each guess what they thought we were having and then we let the balloons out of the box. And yes, if you look closely, there is one blue balloon in the batch....but that's a story for another time ;)
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| Gender Reveal Party with our families |
Because we were not keeping the baby's gender a secret, we decided to keep the name a secret. People constantly asked me what names we liked, but we refused to tell people our ideas or what we were leaning toward. (Although, to be honest, to some extent we weren't sure ourselves!)
Joel-Michael and I would lay in bed at night testing out different names on baby x, trying to see what sounded right to us. We tried Sarah, Naomi, Zelie, and finally Monica (and possibly others that I can't remember!). Mickey would put his hand on my stomach to see if the baby kicked when we said her potential name (but of course we got kicks for multiple names :P).
Monica was the one that we both ended up liking in the end. I'm not sure who's idea it was but I think it might have been Mickey's. I wish I had a great story for how we picked it, but it really was just one of the ideas we had. But I can tell you why we ended up sticking with it.
Since we are Catholic, we wanted (want) our kids to be named after at least one saint so that they have someone to look up to and try to emulate. We also wanted our first child to have a really strong first name since he/she would be the oldest in what we hope will be a big family. And we (well at least I was!) were hoping to find a name that was somewhat unique.
Hence Monica. We both felt that Monica was a good, strong name and we liked how "Monica Recznik" sounded for our first child. St. Monica is an incredible saint who prayed constantly for her son, Augustine's, conversion (which eventually happened), and she is also the patron saint of wives and mothers. One meaning of the name Monica is "advisor." This seemed appropriate considering that she will probably be advising her future younger siblings quite a lot! ;)
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| St. Monica |
Later on, my mother-in-law was telling me how it also means "unique" and"one/alone." This was pretty special to me since I really wanted a unique name but wasn't sure if Monica quite fit my requirements for that ;)
I said earlier that the middle name is easy for people to understand. But we did consider choosing Rose for the middle name for a long time. We really only decided to go with Joan after she was born. Yes, we picked Joan because of our mothers, and also because of St. Joan of Arc (whose feast day happens to be in May like Monica's birthday), but Monica's cousin, Maddie-Jo, is named Madelyn-Joan Mercy, and we didn't want to use the name again, but in the end, we decided it was the name we thought we should pick and in Monica's case, it is her middle name, not part of her first name so it was still a little different. Plus, they're cousins so they'll probably love learning about their shared patron saint together :)
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| Monica and Maddie-Jo |
And there you have it. It's not a super glamorous story, but it is how we chose her name. Lol on the way back from the midwife center after she was born, I asked Mickey, "Are you sure that we picked the right name? We definitely want this name right?" To which he replied, "yes we're sure. Besides, it's too late now - I already wrote it on the birth certificate paperwork!"
But of course we are sure and the more I see her and fall in love with her, the more certain I am that we chose the right name. I am excited to see how she lives up to her patron saints examples!
