She's Here!

 

Our precious daughter was born at Medi Flower Women's Natural Birthing Center after a natural (drug free) labor and delivery, born in water in a birthing tub.  The birth story will be my next blog post!

Elliana Christine is such a blessing to us.  I wanted to share the meaning of her name.  The name 'Eliana' is Hebrew, meaning "my God has answered me."  We liked it spelled better with 2 l's though (I was afraid some people might accidentally call her Elaina if we spelled it the other way).  I feel like so many of my prayers have been answered by God throughout this pregnancy,  from the perfect timing of the pregnancy (we were able to tell our parents in person that we were pregnant last summer, and just able to still travel home for Christmas, and I am not having to go back to work after my maternity leave until the next school year--August 1!  So I get to basically have 4.5 months with Elliana before we have to leave her in the ELC/daycare at work) to finding a diet that works to keep my colon disease in control which was really important to the health of the pregnancy and baby, to finding an amazing birthing center to give birth at the way we wanted to do it with a fantastic doula to support us, to actually going into labor and giving birth at a perfect time so that Michael could have two weeks at home with us instead of just one (he got 5 days paternity leave the first week and then this week was Spring Break), and numerous other prayers that I haven't mentioned...so the name really resonated with me.  I also came across this song by a Christian group called Watermark called Elliana's Song, and once I listened to it I of course cried and I pretty much knew that would be her name...though I still wanted to wait until she was born to see her and make sure it fit!  Her middle name, Christine, means "follower of Christ" or "Christian," which is definitely our prayer for our daughter to become one day.  Christine is also my middle name, as well as my Grandma Kukta's (she is Estelle Christine), so it is a family name and I was happy for her to carry it on, as I have always loved my middle name.

As we were trying to decide upon names (we decided on the middle name pretty early on, but then it was the task of choosing a first name), I came to discover that the meaning of a name really had an influence on how much I liked it and wanted to use it (as well as popularity--I looked up the popularity of all names we liked and pretty much ruled out anything in the top 100 ;).  I felt like choosing a name with a strong meaning was important, as our daughter would hopefully grow into her name, and would probably at some time want to know it's meaning.  I am always amazed at how people in the Bible were either named for a situation they were born into or they seemed to "become" their names.  When I came across it in a baby name book, I put it on our shortlist and later it became one of our top 6, and then when we scrapped our first top 2 because we didn't like each others' favorite, it became part of our second top 2.  ;) The more I considered it for baby Raindrop, the more I really loved it, and Michael really liked it too.  Becoming parents has been an amazing journey for us so far, and we are thankful to God for answered prayers.

Thanks for sharing in our joy!!  Feel free to listen to Elliana's Song which I have embedded here. :)



More to come soon!!