What's in a name?

So many people have asked where Emmy's name came from, I thought I'd share with the internet.

Emerson and Elizabeth are both family names. It was important to both of us to use family names if we could find ones we agreed on! For a girl, it was a little harder. At first we'd decided we would avoid all variations of Beth, Elizabeth, Mary, Marion, Meredith, etc. etc. because there are SO many of us throughout the families. But, that didn't leave us with a lot of girl name choices!

We went into the delivery room with a couple of boy names and girl names. I'd say we were pretty sure we'd use Emerson and call her Emmy, but we wanted to see the baby first. I think we were already thinking of her as Emerson, since we both suspected it was a girl.

PaPa's middle name, my maternal grandfather, was Emerson. My sister and I have always loved that name and thought it would be a good name for a little girl, so when Charles and I found out we were expecting and started talking names, that one came up right away and we both really liked it. Elizabeth is, as I said, a family name on both sides of the family...my middle name, Charles' sister, Beth's, middle name, my mother's middle name, my maternal grandmother's middle name, Charles' Aunt Betty's middle name, and Charles maternal grandmother, who just passed away 4 weeks before Emmy was born, was named Elizabeth. In the end, it just seemed fitting to use Elizabeth to honor Grandmommy and all the other wonderful women in our family. We loved the way Emerson Elizabeth sounded.

When she came out crying, we knew she was a fighter. They asked us her name after they'd showed her to us, and we looked at each other and I said "she's Emmy?" and he said "yes, it's Emerson Elizabeth and we'll call her Emmy." Then the Nurse Practitioner taking care of her, Cathy, sang her happy birthday!