Now that things have settled down and I'm even close to the end of my paternity leave, it's about time I started sharing with the world some of the experiences of new fatherhood. That will have to wait for a new post, though.

First, I want to talk about my baby's name. I've been wanting to blog about the naming process throughout the pregnancy, but decided it would be best to wait till it's all over. Here it is.

Shelly and I have decided to name our daughter Elise Virginia Astle. We didn't finally settle on this name until she was a day old, although we've both really known that was going to be the winner for a long time.

Going into the process, Shelly and I established a few rules. First and foremost, I insisted that we use a name that, when heard, clearly indicates the child's gender and the spelling of the name. No crazy misspellings for us, and no androgynous names (can you believe Ryan is growing in popularity for girls?!).

We also decided that we wanted names that were real (as opposed to made up by us) but not TOO popular. I've always been on board with this requirement, but I've also always thought it a little weird, seeing as how Shelly's full name, Shellyn, is her parents' fabrication, and my name is the #2 boys' name of my generation (a close second to Michael), and neither of us has had a difficult time in life. For clarity's sake, we even established a cutoff: we weren't going to choose a name more popular than #30 on the 2004 Social Security baby name list (though I could have gone for some of them).

For most of the pregnancy, we were open about what names we liked. There were four semifinalists for quite a while--Elise, Jane, Johanna, and Melissa--each with their distinct advantages and disadvantages (ie, Johanna is my grandma's name, but we couldn't decide whether to call her Annie (my choice) or Jo (Shelly's choice); Jane is a neglected gem, but everyone has the knee-jerk reaction of "plain" when they hear it; Melissa is gorgeous and pays homage to various important people in our lives, but its popularity spiked so hard in the 1970s that to our daughter it might end up sounding like a "Mom" name). For the last month or two, we had it narrowed down to Johanna and Elise.

Soon after we found out we were pregnant, Shelly met a baby named Ellie and decided that would be a fabulous name for a little girl. She's right, too. It's cute and sweet and meets all our requirements. But we needed to find an antecedent for it--that is, something for Ellie to be the nickame of. We looked at Eleanor, Ellen, Elle, Ella, Ellery, Helen, Elizabeth, and even my other grandma's name, Elva. One day Shelly came up with Elise and we both knew that was the right one.

We went with Elise because it's sophisticated and beautiful, with such a cute nickname. It has great classical music connotations (the first song I played for the new baby on the piano was Beethoven's Fur Elise (by ear)). Elise is such a great name that when she gets older, I may find myself using that name as much as Ellie (though for right now, it's hard to keep from calling the baby Ellie). The only thing wrong with the name is that Ellie rhymes with Shelly, and I'll end up saying, "Where are Shelly and Ellie?" and things like that. But that's no big deal. I have an Aunt Shelley who named her daughter Kelly.

The middle name we chose has sparked a little more controversy (see comments to the post below), or at least surprise. But there's a method to the madness there too.

Of course, the middle name commemorates the fact that this child was born soon after Shelly and I moved to Virginia, where we intend to stay for at least a while. The name has some special significance to me for that reason. It's not so much that we LOVE the state of Virginia so much (though we do--when we were moving down here, we thought about looking for houses in DC or Maryland for a total of about 16 seconds). To me, it's kind of a declaration.

You know how a lot of people name their children after some ancestor or scriptural or fictitious character, to commemorate them? To me, the name Virginia is like that, but opposite. Rather than looking backward, naming her after some dead person, the name Virginia looks forward. In our family, Virginia is the future. It's hope, anticipation, and the place where our family will grow and develop. We don't know what will happen in Virginia like we know what our great-grandparents did with their lives. So it's riskier in that sense. But I like it because it makes a statement about where our family is going. Literally.

Plus, it's got good connotations of purity and innocence that are desirable, and it is the kind of name you like to like, but wouldn't really use as a first name in this day and age.

Then, when you take her initials and put them together, she's named after Mother Eve (in Latin--you have to take what you can get with your last initial). If you're going to look to the past for a good woman to name your daughter after, there aren't many better than Eve. Mary, maybe. We'll have to work that one in for a future daughter.