Miss Morgan Josephine

I’ve never recorded how it was that we picked Morgan’s name. The whole time I was pregnant, of course, we talked about it, but there was a never a name that we were dead set on. My favorite was Madeleine after my absolute favorite author, Madeleine L’Engle. Her books have had a huge effect on me in the way that I look at things, so it seemed appropriate. However, Adrian didn’t like the French spelling, which I would have insisted on because if it weren’t spelled that way it wouldn’t be the same as Madeleine L’Engle. I also prefered the French pronunciation, but then she’d have had to explain her entire life that her name isn’t spelled Madeline, which is probably slightly more common. Ultimately, the problem with it was just that there are so many girls named Madeline/eine/etc. We were hoping to hit a nice balance between a name that people have heard of and know how to pronounce but not so common that three girls on her dorm floor will share her name (yes, this happened to me… but my mom picked my name so long before I was born that it hadn’t yet reached that crazy level of popularity, so it’s different). My attachment to Madeleine L’Engle is important, hence why I am discussing that name and not any of the others in consideration besides the ones we picked.

Morgan was probably our next favorite name because it was a name we both liked rather than one of us liking it more than the other. We discussed many throughout my pregnancy, but Morgan was always on the list. There are two Morgans that influenced us. One is my dear friend Morgan that I met on my study abroad, who has always brought joy around me and who was also my roommate when Adrian and I got married (and was a fabulous sport about sharing her room with a married woman, which probably did seem a little odd). The other is a young girl, I think now 5 years old, from a family in our ward in California. Both of these Morgans are incredibly sweet people and both come from families for whom we have a lot of respect. We often discuss things we’ve observed from these families as things we’d like to incorporate into our own family. So the name Morgan stuck around so well because of all these happy associations.

Oh my, little baby cardigan. Happily for me, my mom likes them as much as I do (thank you!). She looks like a little person here. It’s crazy.

The only problem with Morgan was a middle name. I always wanted to give my first daughter my middle name, Hope. So Morgan was the favorite name, but I just didn’t feel like it flowed well with Hope. So we kept trying other names until I realized at one point that her first name was more important to me than her middle name, since we’d obviously be using her first name more often. If we liked Morgan, that’s what her name should be. So we had to figure out a middle name we were happy with, or it was back to finding a first name that went with Hope.

She has started blowing little spit bubbles a lot. Hehe.

Friend and roommate Morgan’s middle name starts with a J, and she’s called MJ or Morgan J by her family. We played with other initials, but probably because of that nothing else seemed to fit to me besides a J. So we narrowed our hunt down to J names as possibilities. Josephine was one that stuck out, though I couldn’t come up with a meaning behind it besides the Empress Josephine of France, as in Napoleon and Josephine. She probably wasn’t someone you want your daughter emulating precisely, though he did write her some amazingly lovely letters that I used to go read in the library in college when I needed a break from studying.

Very soon before Morgan was born I picked up the Madeleine L’Engle autobiographies I have and on the first page she wrote about Josephine, her first daughter. Well! That satisfied me on having a meaning behind Josephine. I couldn’t name her Madeleine, but at least there could be some sort of connection there.

I’ve been hoping for weeks to get her little eyelashes captured. I never realized that they were something that would come in as she got older.

We still really didn’t name her until she was born. In fact, for the first three days we just called her “baby” and other nicknames. I was paranoid that it wouldn’t fit her, because I never really had a “yes, this is this child’s name” moment. But it fit, and I feel it is sufficiently pretty for our little girl. And slowly I’m getting used to calling her by it. For about the first month I still wasn’t in the habit of calling her Morgan. Hehe. I’m basically there now.

I love her little chubby hands. They are so soft, and sometimes as she nurses or sleeps she still grabs onto my finger.

And that’s the story of the name, for anyone who wanted to know. Mostly, it’s really for my own journaling purposes, but I’m sharing it with you just because.