The Story Behind the Name : Lena Kathryn Meier

So before I get into how we came up with Lena's name I must tell you Adam and I have name commitment issues. Well, especially me. When Ali was born I could not commit to a name. Adam finally filled out the paperwork and made the final decision all by himself.

I don't really know what my problem is. I have always had a hard time transitioning babies into actual people with an identity. For some reason I always just want to call them baby. It takes me a while to call them by their actual name. I think that might be part of the reason I struggle naming babies. I would maybe be better at it if babies were named when they were a couple months old :).

Anyway, how we came up with little Lena .... We had hardly discussed names before Lena was born. We had a list of names that we liked, many of them were left over from the same list we had when we named Ali. They were Quinn, Remy, Lena, Lane, Nora,, Pearce, Reese ... there could have been a couple more but that is all I can think of right now. Lena, really wasn't ever that high on the list though. The day after Lena was born we had pretty much narrowed the list down to Reese, Remy, and Nora. Then we had pretty much decided on Reese so much so that Adam wrote it on the white board under "babys name". We were having a really hard time 100% committing.

Adam was trying to think of a middle name and so he googled his great grandma's name (Viola Stone). She came up and he realized that her name was actually Lena Viola Stone. He looked at me and said, "Did you know my great grandmas name was Lena?"I did know this. From then on he really wanted to name the baby Lena. It was so funny to me because he usually isn't super opinionated or passionate about anything. But he was super excited about the name Lena. I was still pretty hesitant because I had thought that name was off the table. I gave it a few hours to see if Adam changed his mind and he was not budging.  During this time I talked to my mom on the phone and she had asked if we had decided on a name I told her that all of the sudden Adam wanted Lena. It was her favorite of the choices and she told me that her Grandma's name was Nicolena (which I knew) and she went by Lena. After all of these random connections I decided I might be okay with the name.

We tentatively had decided on Lena and were trying to come up with a middle name. Later that day we got the news that Adam's grandma had passed away. Her name was Kathryn. We really liked the way Lena Kathryn sounded and thought it would be a special tribute to his grandma to give Lena her name.

Side note: our Grandma's like to pass away at big moments in our life. My mom's mom passed away when we were engaged, right before we got married. My dad's mom passed away when I was exactly 37 weeks pregnant with Alice and I got the clear to go to the funeral! And now Adam's Grandma the day after we have our second child!

And here are some more pictures for your enjoyment!