What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
Yep, I’m going all cliche and quoting Romeo and Juliet…because I’m her mommy and I can!
We’ve been asked a zillion times how we came up with her names and well, I thought it would be nice to share.
Dustin and I have been gathering names for years and years. We have what we refer to as “the list.” It’s a multi-page word document that’s divided into boy names versus girl names. For some reason the girl part of the list has always been longer…perhaps we should have taken that as a sign that we would need it…twice! We enjoy picking names, it’s a huge responsibility, but it’s fun.
Boy name: same as it would have been if Amelia had been a boy, Collin Bourke. Easy and done. Collin was after Michael Collins (part of the Apollo 11 mission, not the Irish one) and Bourke is a family name on my side and I just liked the mature sound of it.
Girl name: Well, that’s a different story. We each sat down with “the list” and narrowed it down to our top 10 names and then we compared. If something made his list, but didn’t make mine it was nixed and vice versa. We were left with 5-6 names that we liked and we decided we’d live with them for a while and wait for the right one to step forward.
The thing is, I never needed the other 4 options much less the other half of the list. At 9 weeks I woke up one morning and just knew I was having a girl. Everyone kept saying “oh, but you’re so sick this time, it has to be a boy.” Nope, I knew it was a girl and I knew what her name would be, or at least I thought I knew. I don’t know why, but I knew her name would be Juliet and I thought her middle name would be Lily.
Juliet Lily was nice and I liked it, but something was missing, it wasn’t quite right. Dustin and I poured over those 5 names and I kept telling him the Bean’s name was Juliet…but what was the middle name? We went back and forth and considered our other first name front runner…eventually we realized that our girl name would be a combination of the two.
Now how did we come up with those names? We’ve always like the name Julia so we considered it and the variations on it. So I put Julia, Juliet and Juliana on “the list.” We nixed Julia first since it’s a bit common and decided we preferred Juliet to Juliana as it’s a bit more unique and has a back story. When Dustin and I met each other back in 1996 we were doing high school theater. No, it wasn’t Romeo and Juliet we were a part of, but the first time I was introduced to him he was about 20′ up on a ladder hanging and aiming stage lighting…it was Romeo and Juliet in reverse. We became best friends very quickly and well, the rest is history.
The name Eileen strangely came from both of us. When we made our lists Eileen popped up on both of them. Yes, it’s very old fashioned (I like those names), but it landed on our lists for two different reasons. My grandmother, my mom’s mom was Eileen Cannon. I didn’t get to know my nanny the way I would have liked to, but I know that I can honor her memory through my daughter. When I met Juliet I immediately saw my mom and my nanny in her face so I know without a doubt that her name was meant to be.
Dustin picked Eileen because he was searching for influential women in the world of space and aeronautics to go along with our little Amelia. Dustin happened upon Eileen Collins (notice how Collin popped back up again?), she was the first female commander of a space shuttle. We went back and forth and considered Eileen as the first name, but in my heart I knew the Bean was a Juliet.
So there you have it, the story of the Bean…Juliet Eileen.
