And the people shall call her ...

It was a painstaking task, but I finally finished painting the letters that spell out our daughter's name that we'll hang up in the nursery. So without further ado (for those of you who haven't seen it on Facebook yet) ... we shall call her ...

Savannah Leigh to be more precise. Here is a close up of the design:

I toiled over how to decorate them ... changing my mind no less than 10 times I'm sure. First I was going to paint the sides of each letter a different color that coordinated with the nursery fabric, but decided it wouldn't look good hanging against the pale yellow wall. Then the plan morphed into painting the sides brown, but settling on a design for the front was the major challenge. I'm a huge perfectionist as it is, and I just wanted this project to turn out like I envisioned it. I had high hopes, but as things I tested didn't go as expected, I started to seriously doubt my creative prowess. But alas, one Saturday afternoon phone call to my oh-so-gifted-in-the-creativity-department mom helped steer me toward the design that ultimately turned out just the way I wanted! All of the letters have a clear coat sprayed on them and are waiting to be put up on the wall. Ah, sweet progress!

So that's a lot of detail about some silly wooden letters, but you're probably all wondering exactly how we settled on the name Savannah. Well, shortly after we found out it was a girl ... which was really early ... 16 weeks along to be exact ... I started pushing Cory to think about names. Not that I was in a hurry to really decide on one, I just enjoyed talking about it. We would randomly text each other during the day or one of us would chime in during a commercial break when we watched TV together in the evenings with a "what do you think about __________?" Sometimes the response would be an absolute no and sometimes merely an "eh, it's ok I guess."

Going into the process we decided we weren't going to have a laundry list of names we liked. We were going to keep it narrowed down to a top three at all times. This is what we did when we bought our house, too, and it worked out really well. If we thought of a new name that was better than option 2, but not as good as option 1, we would move it into place and knock off the one at the bottom of the list. One day at work I texted the name Savannah to Cory and he replied that he liked it. That evening we discussed middle names and added it to the list, but admittedly not to the top at first. Nope, it moved up when we found reasons to no longer like the names in the first and second positions.

At first, I wasn't sold on the middle name Leigh (or Lee or Lea, which were the spellings first suggested by Cory). I liked Savannah Grace. In fact, the only thing stopping us from committing was the middle name. There really wasn't a lot of discussion about Savannah. We both like it. It sounded good with our last name. The persona it carried fit with what we picture our little girl being like. I was perfect. But the more I mulled over Cory's middle name choice, the more I liked the sound of it. Once it dawned on me to spell it L-e-i-g-h instead of L-e-e or L-e-a, I was willing to concede. :o) Then we suddenly found ourselves torn over whether to spell Savannah with an H on the end or not since her middle name would end in an H, but it didn't take long to get through that debate. Two names that end in H is no big deal, so Savannah Leigh Baker she shall be.