Names…

I’ve had a few people ask me about how we chose Luke’s name…it’s a sweet story, really, and one I hope Luke will be proud of! I’ll have to start by telling you about the years leading up to our little Luke’s arrival. After many many many years of infertility, we began our first adoption journey. At that time, Jeremy and I had been married for 11 years and most of our friends/family had started or completed their families already. This meant most names that we would have chosen were taken by the time our first son arrived. Also, we both love using meaningful/family names which made our selection more narrow. On the drive to the hospital, we made our final decision…Jeremiah Thomas. Jeremiah was chosen partly because it’s a “form” of Jeremy’s name and partly because Jeremiah 29:11 was the verse we clung to in the four long years that Jeremy battled depression. Thomas is Jeremy’s dad’s name. From the start, I said I would call him JT…not many people were on board with this idea (including Jeremy) but it stuck :) and I LOVE his name! Fast forward three years later, and our second child is on the way. Since our birth parents chose not to find out the sex of the baby until birth, we had to begin thinking about possible girl and boy names. However, our birthparents had also decided to name their child and requested we consider using the names they had chosen. They had selected Katherine Alexandria and William Connor and expressed their desire for us to use Katherine/William and change Alexandria/Connor if we wanted. I was a little sad because I had really wanted to name our child without any influence but knew in my heart that honoring our birth parents was more important than any “control” issues I may have had. The girl name was pretty easy. We decided to name her Mary (after Jeremy’s mom) and keep Katherine (to honor our birth parents). We loved it and had decided we would call her “Mary Kate” . Girl name settled…on to the boy name…this was where I was struggling. William Williamson was a mouth full and we had a hard time finding a middle name that “rolled” with it. I was convinced that if our birth parents knew our last name, they would understand if we decided to change the name. We got the call around 4:15a.m. on Tuesday, August 30th with the news that our baby BOY was born the night before…we had been aware that our birth mom was in labor the day before and we were scheduled to arrived at the hospital around 11:00 a.m. During the 3 1/2 hour drive, we discussed names again. We decided that if our birth parents were not completely set on us using William, we would change it.  If they were set, then we chose Luke (after my sweet pawpaw) for the middle name. We decided then to call him Luke. During our time at the hospital, we never mentioned names, but saw the intense look of love in our birth dad’s eyes as he referred to his son as William. Jeremy and I never even discussed it further…he was and always has been William…we couldn’t and don’t ever want to change that!