With our son Maximus, we had his name picked out MONTHS before he arrived.  With our daughter, not so much.

We knew what her middle name and last name would be, but we didn’t choose her first name until AFTER she was born, and on the LAST day of my hospital stay.  Only HOURS before I was discharged.

Ideally, I suggest choosing a name BEFORE the baby arrives.  One less thing to do / think about / decide while recovering from your delivery or c-section / on pain meds / not getting any sleep /caring for a newborn.

The funny thing is, we ended up going with the very first name Joe mentioned.  Months ago.  If we’d just stuck with it from the beginning instead of questioning it, and wondering if it was the right choice, we could have skipped spending the last 36 hours in the hospital making a decision!

The name we chose for her is not exciting, unique, unusual, trendy, made-up or after anyone in the family.  I think that’s why we had a hard time going with it initially.

We felt like there must be something better!  If we just gave it some thought, surely something fantastic would come to mind.  Right?  And if we just gave it a LOT of thought, something really, really exciting or that AHA! moment would happen.

But the AHA! moment came for us after searching through a book of baby names.  A woman from the hospital’s birth certificate office, desperate for us to make a decision and turn in paperwork, gave us a book of 40,000 baby names.  40,000!

After looking through it, writing down ALL the names we liked and narrowing it down, we still wanted the very fist name Joe had mentioned months ago.  No stone left unturned.  We knew we’d considered everything.

AHA!

So this little baby girl we were about to take home, finally had a name: Sarah Florabelle Clarke Anderson