The names

Tonight, though I've talked about the names plenty, I posted them on Facebook for the first time. I thought I'd come here and give the explanation behind the names. 

Joseph was easy. The month before we got pregnant, Chile dreamed that we would have a son and were to name him Joseph. Chile doesn't like me to tell this to people because he thinks it makes him sound crazy. Let's face it though, I already told you all about my dream/vision or whatever that was. So if you're going to think we're crazy you probably already do. And you're still reading so it's really a moot point.  Anyway, like I said that was easy. But the rest was a hard fought battle. You see, my dear precious husband speaks Hebrew. And Hebrew is much more meaningful and layered and beautiful and blah blah blah than English or Spanish. So he wanted to use Hebrew words for our children's names. Not names friends, WORDS. Early on we discussed that unusual was ok, but unheard of was not ok (at least in my book. I'm a teacher, I know how these things work.).  However, Ejad (pronounced e-had) was his #1. Now, I rejected it for a first name long ago, but when it was just one boy I graciously told him we could use it for a middle name. Ejad has a beautiful meaning of 'unique, there is no other'... But it's just weird. And as a middle name it seems like it would be torture enough. THANKFULLY it also means 'there is no second'. And well, it's twins y'all. So there sorta is a second. Ya know? So that made Chile feel bad enough to go for our other choice, Nathaniel. Nathaniel was my paternal grandfather's name. It's a name my parents were going to use had they not been 0 for 3 on boys. And Chile thought my dad would really like it if we used it, especially since we aren't guaranteed another boy. I loved it, so I jumped right on that one. And just like that, we had settled upon Joseph Nathaniel. 

Now, you may have thought that was a battle, but the real battle was for our sweet girl's name. We had a second boys name, but could not agree at all upon a girl name. Seriously people- suggested names: Atigbah, Aleph, Alpha, Hessed.... These were 100% for serious from my husband. Meanwhile he was rejecting my cute names like Ava, Isabella, and Carolina. A long while before we had talked about Kenzie. When I was in Egypt we used to play the game of, "If you had to give your kid a middle eastern name what would you pick?"  I always liked Nour, Maya, and Kenzi (serious hats off to one of my former student's family- 3/3 for names I'd use including Maya and Kenzi. The third is Adam.). So he had said he liked Kenzi. On the way to the ultrasound I politely asked if we could revisit the name Kenzi. He again said he liked it. I, attempting to seal the deal, suggested we do Kenzi Rebekah. He LOVED Rebekah. I always thought it was nice, but a little traditional. But my admittedly manipulative self knew I could get Kenzi if I put it with Rebekah. He of course agreed to those terms. So we added an e to the end of Kenzie just cause we liked it better, and that was that!

Now for the meanings:

Joseph: God will add

Nathaniel: God has given

Kenzie: Arabic for my treasure

Rebekah: Captivating 

And we won't go into the fact that Chile wanted to spell Joseph Yosef instead because that's the Hebrew spelling and with his Spanish accent he can't hear a difference between the j and y sounds.  That was soooo never happening.