A Front Porch Entrance: The Birth of my Belle Part 14

I turned and walked back inside. Upon returning to Katherine’s side, the three of us plus one baby offered up a quick prayer of thanksgiving. The baby’s entrance while dramatic and been smooth despite the chord being wrapped around the neck and Katherine had had no tearing. Opening my eyes from my brief prayer, I realized that we still did not have a name for this little girl.

I began to discuss this with Katherine and Suzanne. “So do you think Gabrielle Victoria or Ava Marie (this is a pseudonym). I could tell that Suzanne liked Ava Marie, but she wisely withheld her opinion. I asked Katherine, “Which name do you like the best.” She replied very contentedly as she held our little girl, “I don’t care, you decide.” This caught me off guard: my usually opinionated wife didn’t have an opinion! The final decision was going to be totally up to me. Surprisingly, I found this to be the most overwhelming part of the entire morning as the bestowing of names is extremely important to me and I was not prepared to make a final decision.

I decided to call our parents and our other sister Rebecca (Julie and Sherwin were out of the country). I called each of them and gave them an abbreviated run down of the last three minutes. My dad asked, “What’s her name?” I said, “I don’t know…” He then said, “Today is Nanny’s birthday.” Nanny is my great grandmother, our daughter’s great-great grandmother who was turning 99 years old.

I then went back to agonizing over the name. We had been leaning toward Gabrielle but had not come to a conclusion about the middle name. I had decided that I liked middle names that connoted royalty or possibly the name of an English battleship from when England was at the height of its power and ruled the seas. Names such as Repulse, Bellerophon, Hercules, and Audacious somehow just did not seem appropriate though I liked the name Victoria which matched the criteria for both battleship and royalty.