Jaycoby Mark
Jaycoby's name was picked long before I was ever pregnant with him, but I really didn't like it. Somehow I came up with specific criteria for my first child's name. I wanted it to start with the letter "J" (because there are a lot of names that start with J and that would give plenty of options to choose from) and I wanted it to be unique. With that in mind, a lot of bizarre names were thrown out on the table.
One day, while hanging out in his future uncles old bedroom, we saw a poster on the wall that had the name "Mike Jacoby" (he's a snowboarder). I thought the name Jacoby was weird and swore our child would never have that name. His father insisted on keeping the name on the short list, in hopes that I would get used to the name by hearing it more often. Obviously it worked. We changed it to Jaycoby, with the extra 'y', because we had a close friend whose name was Jaysen, and we wanted to include the "Jay" in our child's name.
His middle name was easy. Both of Jaycoby's grandpas have the first name Mark. We thought it would be great to honor both of our dad's in our child's name, so it made for an easy pick.
I love it that he has such a unique name. Yes, it is a name that will forever be pronounced wrong at the doctors office, and on his first day of school at roll call, but he will happily correct you and carry on. It's a name that has been changed into all kinds of nicknames by different people ("Mycoby", "Coby", "Jaycobo", "Bobers", etc.), but he is firm about being called by the original: "No, my name is JAYcoby".
***If he had been a girl, he would have been Jaylie Rayanne. Jaylie??? I definitely wouldn't pick that name now.
Rayanne was a mix of our mom's middle names: Rae and Diane.
Ella Michelle
Ella's name was also picked before I was pregnant. In fact, her name was picked before we were even married. It's almost embarrassing to admit it, but we chose her name after hearing a song by the singer, Rihanna. Lol. She has this song called "Umbrella". The lyrics go: "You can stand under my umbrella. Ella, ella, ay, ay, ay". No, we are not Rihanna groupies or anything. We just happened to have the song on in the car one day and Jaycoby was singing along to the lyrics. I don't think he was even two at the time and we just thought it sounded hilarious and adorable. When he got to the "ella" part, we got to talking about how that would be a pretty name if we ever had a little girl. Really meaningful, huh? Well, that is how we settled on the name of Ella.
We had a harder time agreeing on a middle name, but we finally chose Michelle after my name. I like for middle names to be family names and we just had a difficult time settling on whose name we should honor. Um, how about her mommy? Sounded good to me :-). Plus, I like that Michelle is the girl-version of Michael, so it's kind of like she's named after her mommy and her daddy.
I never thought that I would have picked such a popular name for one of my children, but we think Ella is so beautiful. Unfortunately, she will probably have to go by "Ella R." when it comes time for school, since there are so many others. Oh well. She will still stand out, because she will be the cutest, smartest and most talented :-).
***If she had been a boy, she would have been Evan Michael (No, I didn't pick the letter "E" this time for name-selection. We just happened to pick two names that started with that letter). I wanted something that wasn't too traditional, so Jaycoby's name didn't sound totoallyoff-the-wall. But Mike definitely likes more traditional sounding names, so we felt this was the perfect compromise.
Michael was obviously after Mike's first name, but I have a brother named Michael as well. Both of my brothers have sons with the middle name Michael, so it would've kept the pattern going.
1 comment:
Thanks for sharing!
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