Tuesday, November 8, 2011

How We Chose Everleigh's Name


A sweet shower gift from my friend, Kim!

I thought I'd share the story about how we chose Everleigh's name, because I get asked about it a lot :)

My first "real job" out of college was working for a financial company in town (pre market crash!). Part of my job was to man the telephones and speak to investors, so on a daily basis I heard lots of unique names from all over the US. Being my planny-planerson self, I already knew a baby (or 2) was something I wanted in the future, and I often kicked around potential kids names. Anyways, while working there, I actually made this hypothetical list into a handwritten list I kept in my desk. Any time I heard a cool name I liked, I would add it to the list.

Well, one day I spoke to a man named Everly, and I loved the name so much, I immediately added it to my list. From then on it was my top boy's name. I was pretty certain if I had a boy, I would name him Everly, and if I had a girl, I would name her Tilly. On paper.

So when we found out we were having a girl, I told Scott about my Tilly name, to which he responded that there was no way he was naming a real person that. So I made a list of approximately 50 names I liked, which he narrowed down to about 8 in 30 seconds. Harper made the cut, but Everly was not even on there since that was our top boy name. After reviewing the names, Scott asked, "what about just sticking with Everly anyways?" To which I replied, "let's do it".

The next morning on the drive in to work, Scott said out of the blue "Everly Harper". And it was settled. Later we decided to change the spelling to make her gender a little more clear, since our baby book had Everly listed as a boy name, and the only other Everly I had ever met was also a man. So we landed on Everleigh Harper.

As my pregnancy progressed, I would often google the name "Everly", "Everleigh", "Everlee", etc. jusrt to see what was out there. Our baby book listed the (boy's name) Everly as meaning "singing", which we also thought was awesome since we're both musicians. However, I had a hard time finding this meaning anywhere else since....

At first my google searches pretty much came up empty handed. Which we thought was cool. We loved the name and that was all that mattered. We swore she'd be the only kid in her class with the name, but thought it was still mainstream enough to not be weird just for weird's sake. Then as we got closer to her birth, I started seeing more and more of the name popping up. Someone from the Twilight movie named their baby Everleigh. A popular baby blogger (whose blog I discovered through this googling process and now read faithfully) named her new baby Everly. Suddenly the name was everywhere.

When Everleigh was about 3 months old, we took her to a birthday party and she met her first Everlee face to face, a new baby girl that belonged to one of my sister's friends. So I guess it's blowing up a little. But I just wanted to share that we chose the name a long time ago, and picked it because we loved the meaning and the ring of it and all the images it conjured up for us. It had nothing to do with what was or was not popular, or what another blogger or friend named their kid. I truly did not even know baby blogs existed before these searches!

Plus after meeting this little girl, we KNEW she was an Everleigh if there ever was one.  That said, she may hate us when she has to write it out for Kindergarten.

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