Alternate names

I am a planner. Big time. Everything always goes according to my plan, and I make sure of it. The death of Brynn was not part of my plan! We had our names picked out for a long time. We both agreed from before we got married that we wanted two kids. No more, no less. Early on, we picked out two girl names and two boy names. They matched, they had ties, they were PERFECT. First came Corynn, my all time favorite girl name and her middle name Erika after her daddy Erik. Then, we had a second girl, we would use Brynn. It rhymed and we loved it and her middle name would be Erin because Corynn's middle name was only one letter different from daddy's name, so Brynn's had to be as well. The names were perfectly created to go with my perfectly created life and family.

As I said in my original post about the day Brynn was born, we struggled with the idea of using this name. I had never prepared another name. I never thought of an alternate in the case that she didn't make it. She was Brynn. I had nothing else to call her in my mind. We came up with another name at the last minute, but it was wrong and fake, so in the end we said goodbye to our matching girl names and gave her the name she was going to have.

Being a control freak and planner, this has been difficult for me. Now what will I use for a girl name if we have another? I had never thought of any others. I didn't like anything else that rhymed with Corynn, and what about the middle name? I had run out of options for one letter alterations of Erik. Erika and Erin were all I had.

Now it was all messed up. I am glad I gave Brynn her name. I feel very good about that. But it did leave me feeling a little lost.

So over the last two weeks, I have spent a lot of time looking for names. Some might think this is weird, but for me it has helped me move on and think about the future. It's good therapy for a planner like myself.

I have come up with names for babies that make it/ live and babies who don't make it and become little angels.

There is always a chance I could have twins because I will be taking mild fertility meds to make me ovulate, so I have two names for each gender and each outcome. I had to give up on my rhyming names idea. I tried to find others, but nothing fit. They will just have to have completely different names (as most siblings do) and I will just have to be asymmetrical for once ;-)

I decided to look for names with meaning. In the past, I have never picked names by meaning. I picked them solely on whether or not I liked the sound of them. Brynn's names mean "a small hill from ireland" and Corynn's names mean "maiden ever powerful". Again, they were not picked for their meanings, but my future babies will be. My boy names for surviving boys have been picked and set for a long time, so they aren't chosen for meaning, but Angel boys, Angel girls and surviving girls all have meaningful names.

(I did have them listed below, but decided to remove them because I don't want judgement or opinions of how "weird" it is that I thought about alternate names or how/what I choose to name my angel babies if I'm unfortunate to have another, so I won't tell anyone except my closest family and friends what the name is going to be until the baby is born.This way no one will know if I gave the baby the "original" name or the "alternate" name. I'm amazed how judgmental people can be over someone else's grieving process when they've never experienced it themselves.)