What's in a Name?

You might imagine the amount of chaos of an emergency c-section for babies that are born on the cusp of viability.  After they pulled the first baby out, I heard the doctor say, "Baby A is a girl".  I was confused.  Was I having 2 girls because Baby B was supposed to be a girl?  I was told that was just the one they pulled out first.  It's funny to think about it now.  Camdyn is the go-getter and in a hurry to be the first to do everything (except gain weight that is), so it is fitting that she was born first.  Only 1 minute later, out came Baby B.  The titles (I wouldn't call it names) Baby A and Baby B were flying around that operating room.  About 50 people were in the room - a team for me, a team for Baby A, and a team for Baby B. 

As the doctors kept relaying information about Baby A this and Baby B that, Jim announced authoritatively that Baby A's name was Camdyn and Baby B's name was Cade. I remember feeling a sense of relief and calm after he said this.  The truth was that we had not yet decided on names.  We thought we still had 4 months to finalize our picks.  I didn't like it anymore than he did that they kept being called A and B.  It seemed so cold.  Jim tells me now that he didn't know what was going to happen, but he thought they should have names.  When I asked him how he decided on Camdyn when he liked another name better, he told me that he knew that was the name that I liked more.

I am not even sure if their names would have been Camdyn and Cade had they stayed inside another 4 months and gave us time to figure it out.  We always knew Cade would be Cade.  We had several different names for Camdyn.  The name Camdyn had only come into the picture a few weeks prior to their birth.  I found the name Camden in the boy's section of a baby name book.  I thought it was a cool name and it sounded more feminine to me than masculine.  I started really liking the name Camdyn for a girl.  My only concern was that the names sounded too much alike.  For the record, I did not choose their names to be matchy-matchy.  I don't like that they do sound so similar, yet I love both of their names independently.  And that is the story of how they got their names.

Interestingly, I met two other families in the NICU who had naming challenges as well.  When your baby (or babies) are born months early, it's not only the nursery that you don't have ready.  One family named their baby and then decided to change the name later.  They had to go through leaps and hurdles to do this.  Another family said they weren't sure they really liked the name they had chosen, but it was growing on them.  I have always found it interesting to hear how people decide on their baby's name, and it is especially interesting to see how parents of preemies decide on a name months before their selections were finalized.