What's In a Name?

Due to the fact that my body no longer finds the need to A.) sleep more than 2-3 hours at a time or B.) sleep past 4:30am I've decided to just give up on trying to sleep for now and blog about something I've wanted to write about for a while. And yes...I know this is just my body preparing me for Emma Claire's debut, well that and the fact that she thinks that my bladder is her BFF. Anyways on to what this post is really about :-)

PS this is probably the longest post I've written that doesn't include about a million pictures...SO if you don't want to read it all then please scroll to the bottom and give me your two cents about my current problem :-)

I'm pretty sure that the most pressing issue the Hubs and I faced when we first found out we were pregnant was what in the world we were going to name this new little human that was growing inside me. Of course we had talked about baby names before, but it's really not the same when you know that you're naming someone FOR REAL. I'm sure all of you preggers and Moms out there can relate. It's fun to play around and think of names, but when the responsibility falls solely on YOU to give someone a name for LIFE it's a whole new ball game!

Now we figured out pretty quickly that if it was a boy he would be named Jackson David. I have always loved the name Jackson and the Hubster loved it too so that was pretty easy. David is a family name and we just liked the flow :-) As for girls names...woah nelly, we had NO IDEA. Around 15 weeks pregnant we thought this wasn't a big deal because we both thought it was a boy...so we were thrown for a little loop when we found out that low and behold, it was a GIRL!

So here we were faced with naming a sweet little GIRL now. I really wanted her middle name to be Leigh, after my Mother's middle name. Well my Mom's is spelled "Lee" and we decided switched it up a little. Then I realized that Leigh as a middle name could be a great duo of a double name. I had never considered double names before but thought if I found the right one it could be cute! The names at the top of our list were Caroline, Charlotte and Claire but both of those are pretty long on their own and I thought would be too long for a double name, and "Claire Leigh" sounded like "clearly". So we were back to square one. What did I do you may ask? Googled. Yep, I googled "Southern Baby Names" and the first website that came up was "Double Names from the US Deep South"! HA! No joke. You should go visit...there are some fun ones there. After doing some "research" I decided that I LOVED the name Emma Leigh, and I still love that name. However, I felt that she would be saying "It's not Emily, it's Emma Leigh" her whole life and would eventually get sick of it and no longer want her true double name. (Or her Mommy would get tired of correcting people!) Since Emma wasn't originally on our names list I didn't want her name to be shortened to just "Emma". So we chose to drop the Leigh (it's being saved for the future...don't worry!) and and were now without a name again. So I went back to the list I found and saw "Emma Claire" and thought, "huh, that's cute". Even though I wanted Leigh as a middle name, Claire had been on our list and I loved the sound of "Emma Claire". So the Hubster and I started playing around and saying her name and we loved it, we shared it with our families and they loved it! So there ya have it! The long story of where "Emma Claire" came from! Now onto my current problem...

I mentioned earlier that Emma wasn't originally on our list of names, and while I think it's an adorable name there's a reason we am not naming our daughter "Emma", we're naming her "Emma Claire". Now I don't want to be that Mom that corrects people about her name constantly so my question to you is:

 How do I make "Emma Claire" her true first name?

Do we need to give her a true "middle" name so that "Emma Claire" is the first name? Do we hypenate it? Thoughts?

I was hesitant to the idea of giving her another name at first because I felt that that would be a looooong name for a little girl, but the Hubster pointed out that she'll have a big personality so she can afford to have a big name ;-) Isn't he the cutest? So there ya have it folks...my current delimma. If you're a Momma who has a kiddo with a double name, what did you do? Did you just call your child by their name until people noticed that it wasn't just one name? HA, that would drive me crazy!

Whew...like I said, longest written post EVER I think for me. BUT I need your advice and I felt the need to explain where Emma Claire came from :-) And hey, it's always fun to read how people came up with their child's name..at least for me!