The Name Game

A lot of people have asked us why we chose the name Audrey. Believe me, it was no easy task. We had some very specific guidelines that we wanted to follow and it took just about all nine months to settle on our choice:

"Audrey" - meaning "regal" or "noble strength"
"Jean" - meaning "God is gracious"

So how did we get there? Well, we knew that we wanted her to have the middle name Jean (which is my mom's middle name, David's grandmother's name, and a shortened form of my middle name) so we started searching for something that would fit well with that.

Of course we both had to like it and we didn't want it to conjure up bad memories of anyone, so that automatically narrowed it down from an astronomical number to about thirty. It was important, too, that if she was going to share the name of a well-known celebrity or famous person, that it be someone we respected. (And while Audrey Hepburn had flaws, I'm sure, I have always loved her style and graceful poise. Not to mention all of her humanitarian work.)

We agreed that we wanted it to be easy to spell, preferably with only one way to spell it. This was important because we usually have to spell "Sinyard" (which, I mean really? It's SIN and YARD). We didn't want the poor girl to have to waste who knows how much time over her lifespan spelling both her first and last names.

On top of all that criteria, we didn't want it to be shortened. We wanted something classic, but that would fit her as a baby, a child, and a grown woman. It couldn't be too "old" or "adult" sounding. We also threw out any names that were on the top ten most popular lists for the past couple of years. We wanted it to be unique, but not weird. Known, but not shared by another girl in every class for her entire academic career.

Initials were taken into consideration, as was her monogram. We didn't want to spell any dirty or weird words, but fortunately the "J" in the middle took care of that. We carefully thought through any possible rhymes that would make her the object of cruel playground taunting. And since we had a boy's name we really liked, we also wanted it to sound good with that in case she had a brother down the road.

We read and reread thousands of possibilities in name books, wrote and rewrote lists, ranked and re-ranked our top choices. We spent hours thinking about it, discussing it, and trying it out. We finally settled on what is a definitely a perfect fit.

And this is how introductions usually go:

Kind stranger: "Aw! She's so cute! What's her name?"
Us: "Audrey."
Kind stranger: "Aubrey? That's beautiful!"

*Sigh*