naming Mattie

We had a hard time choosing a name for Mattie.  I had all sorts of criteria that drove everyone crazy.  I wanted a two syllable name because I thought it flowed better with our last name.  It couldn't start with J (too Duggar.)  It had to sound good with Jillian (and Jilly.)  And, I like older names.  During our weekly skype visits with my family they'd give tons of suggestions and I always had some reason why the name wouldn't work (like I said, I was driving them crazy.)

One day I was driving around and suddenly the name Mattie came to me.  I texted Bryan:

Bryan wasn't very familiar with the name Mattie (it's a very southern name) and so he was hesitant at first.  But as the days went on we both started liking it more and more.  We were worried that she'd spend her whole life saying "It's Mattie, with t's.  No, it's not short for anything, just Mattie."  But, in the end we decided that we liked it enough to go for it.  Though Mattie was the frontrunner for the last few weeks of my pregnancy we didn't officially decide until a couple hours after she was born.

We hadn't chosen a middle name either.  As we headed to the hospital my sister Leslie said to not have the baby til after midnight because May 16th is her birthday.  Well, that obviously didn't work out.  But since Mattie was born so close to Leslie's birthday, and since we both loved the name Claire we did give her Leslie's middle name.

It's funny to go from calling her "baby" for so many months to actually using her name.  You give a baby a name and suddenly they seem like so much more of a real person.  And after these few weeks with her I can't imagine her being anything except Mattie Claire.