As I'm sure many of you know already, Mark and I decided not to find out the gender of the baby before the birth. This turned out to be quite the adventure with all the NSTs I did and the ultrasounds that came because of the gestational diabetes (GDM). I had been doing pretty good - I only had one or two times when the technician had slipped up on a gender and they had slipped up in both directions, so I remained fairly oblivious as to the actual gender. For some reason I had it in my head that the baby was going to be a boy - I'm not sure why... Although it might have had something to do with the fact that every random person I ran into guessed that it was a boy - the checkout lady in the grocery store, a random car repair guy, strangers in the park, the lab tech drawing blood - everyone who ventured a guess said 'boy.'
Then there was my 38 week ultrasound. I needed to have a 37 week ultrasound to make sure the baby wasn't growing too big and see what kind of an inducement schedule needed to be considered. Turns out the baby was a good size, but not too big, so they didn't need to induce early. I had forgotten to mention that I didn't want to know the gender before the test started, but since with this hospital they don't say a thing to you for the first 20 minutes or so anyways, I figured I was good for a while. At some point I asked if the baby was looking ok - if anything was looking wrong or unhealthy - and the tech said 'she's looking good'. I'm not sure why this hit me so hard, but I got the strongest impression that it was a girl and her name was Emily. I thought about that while the tech was still busy doing her thing and realized there's no Emily's on my side of the family - so we're good there, there were no Emily's on Mark's dad's side, so we were good there. It was sounding like the perfect name - and then I realized that there was an Aunt Emily on Mark's mom's side. And the totally embarrassing part is that, aside from Aunt Grandma that we see all the time, Mark's Aunt Emily is the aunt that we see the most often... She the one who's most often at the farm when we go visit. So I decided that there was no way we were going to name out kid with the same name as someone we saw so often and put it out of my mind. A few minutes later in the ultrasound conversation I said something that made the tech ask 'did they tell you the baby was a boy or a g....' and I said 'they didn't tell me, I didn't want to know' and she said 'oh, I almost told you right there!' and I thought she meant that the baby was a boy - so I forgot the whole baby's-name-is-Emily thing and didn't worry about it.
After she was born, and we realized she really was a girl, we tried to find names. We have only a few criteria for names. They have to be normal (not these strange new celebrity-type names), semi-common and easily recognizable as to gender. Names that are currently popular often don't meet these criteria in our minds. We like the names, but can't bring ourselves to call our kids that... [With Shelly we had her named Alana for a while, but couldn't bring ourselves to actually call her that and had to switch before we even left the hospital] So, with this baby we went with Emily for a while, until the birth certificate lady brought us a baby names book and we realized that Emily had been the #1 name (not in the top 5 - the #1) for 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006. The book was published in 2006. I have a fairly common name and often had more than one Rachel in my classes with me, and I didn't want to name my kids a super common name. So we tossed around a few other names; Angela, Lindsey, Natalie and some others. Angela almost made it for a while there. Eventually I couldn't get past that strange impression I had gotten in the ultrasound room, and Mark and I got past our dislike of all things trendy and our desires to have our kids not be one of 15 in their circle of friends, so Emily it became.
Then there was the stress of what to do with a middle name. We tossed around several ideas and Mark kinda wanted it to be some form of Sue (Suzanne, Susan, etc). I couldn't get past how totally hick-like that sounded. It sounds like someone trying to call in the pigs for dinner (ssuuueeeyy!) and I managed to pull of such a good hick accent making fun of the name that Mark dropped it and we decided on Anne instead.
Update: Now that she's 3 months old her new nickname is EmieSue. I was even informed the other day (by Shelly) that her name isn't Emily - it's EmieSue. And when Jason comes to say hi to her it comes out 'i e-e-ue' (hi emiesue). Guess I should have listened to Mark... :)
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