What's in a name

We didn't come up with Lela's name until we were in the recovery room after her birth, and I feel like we did pretty well under pressure.  I still love the name Lela Charlotte and it's a hard act to follow.  (Check out Lela's "What's in a name post" here).  After months of indecision, I was really hoping that we would have a similarly brilliant flash of inspiration in the recovery room after Sasha's birth, but that didn't happen.  In fact, she didn't have a name for almost 48 hours.  We went into the hospital with a list of names that we liked, but nothing really seemed right once we saw her.

The first night in the hospital, I was woken up every hour or so by nurses checking on me and bringing me the baby to nurse, but sometime in between the wake-ups and through the haze of the hormones and pain meds I had a dream that our baby was named Sasha.  Nothing remarkable happened in the dream...but it was a fact that our baby existed and that her name was Sasha.  And when I woke in the morning, I found myself thinking of her as a Sasha.  The weird thing is that name had never been on our list. We had never discussed it, we don't know anyone else named it, and I never really had much of an opinion of it. But once I started thinking of her as a "Sasha," it was hard to shake.  It took another 24 hours before we committed to it on her birth certificate.  Now, of course, I think the name fits her perfectly.

Sometime in her first week home, we started calling her "Sasha Bear" and the nickname has stuck.  I just love the way Lela says, "little sa-sha-bear".  I've got to get that on video.