What's in a Name?

I wasn't the type of girl who grew up dreaming of her wedding dress or how her wedding would be. I was a reader. An avid reader at that, and so I did have the imagination for dreaming something like a wedding up, but the details of a wedding weren't something that important to me growing up. For me, I loved dreaming up stories for different characters, and loved keeping a list of intriguing names that I liked as I went through my reading adventures.

When we started thinking about getting pregnant, I dusted off that list of names (yes, I had saved it...) and hubby and I started adding to it. Every now and then we would toss out an idea. For the longest time, neither of us cared for the names the other one would think up, so our list didn't grow very quickly at all. One name I knew for certain I wanted, which was my great-grandmother's name - Margaret. She was such a loving influence on my life, and I lost her when I was a teenager. I wanted to memorialize her by using her name as our daughter's middle name. 

Hubby felt Margaret was old-fashioned...he was right, but I was stuck on the name! I offered up a compromise and he agreed it was a good name, after some good saleswomanship.

The night before Little One's baby shower, I had a dream in which she told me her name. I didn't see what our daughter looked like in the dream. I felt her in the dream, and as I was surrounded by this sense of our daughter, she told me her name. I don't recall in what manner she told it to me, but I remember waking up and telling hubby immediately that our daughter's name was Z.

The day of our baby shower, a friend's daughter "drew" a picture in their card to us. When I looked at the "picture" it was actually squiggles that looked like Z's name. No coincidence there, I knew! We then had a baby shower with hubby's family that couldn't travel our way. Among gifts to us was a book with her name in the title. Again - it could not be a coincidence! 

We had the name for our beautiful little girl. Our pearl of life.