Day 16 of 31 for 21 - Naming our kids

I've been tagged by A at The Narretto Family and Kim at Rees's Pieces to share the origin of our children's names.

Nathan William - I mentioned this yesterday, but Nathan means "gift of God." It was a very appropriate choice for this child for whom we prayed for years. William is a family name on both sides. Nathan has an Uncle Bill, a Great Uncle Bill, a Pop named Bill, and he would have had a Great Grandpa named Bill had my mom's father been alive when Nathan was born. It's also Mark's middle name. Before we found out his gender at the 20week ultrasound, we had an Elite Eight list of names (combination first and middle): four girl names and four boy names. So once we found out he was a boy, we had a Final Four. Maybe someday I'll post a video of us finding out he was a boy. We were at a party with a bunch of friends in Nashville. Other friends and family were on a conference call, and we opened the envelope from my perinatologist and everyone heard, "It's a boy!" at the same time. It was super fun!

Micah Louis - Until about two weeks before Micah was born, we thought his name was Noah. As my due date approached, Mark became less sold on that as his name. The name Noah was growing in popularity and Mark didn't want him to have others in his class with the same name. I had done a little research on consonants and which ones would be more difficult for him to say based on speech issues he might have. When Micah arrived early, he arrived without a name. He was transported to Milwaukee the afternoon he was born. Mark decided to stay with me that evening, get some sleep, and head for Milwaukee after we decided on a name. We were pretty sure about the name Micah before he left (Micah is similar to Michael, and it means "who is like God?"), but he didn't have a middle name. We arrived on his middle name later that night. Louis means "famed warrior." It was very important to us to have a strong name for Micah as we knew he would be fighting some battles in his life. Louis is also my brother's middle name and it seemed appropriate since he and his wife would be guardians of m3s if anything ever happened to us.

Matthew Taylor - Matthew also means "gift of God." It was in the Final Four list for Nathan. Of course, we didn't use Nathan's Final Four list... Mark had to start over with each child, so I thought it was hilarious that we landed on a name that we had chosen over three years earlier. Mark went to Taylor University (small, Christian college in central Indiana) and Taylor U was named in honor of a missionary and author named Bishop William Taylor.

In the interest of continuing the chain of names, I'm tagging the following people to tell us about their children's names:

Amy at A Scrapbook of Sorts
Melanie at Baeten Family
Heidi at Nuts and Boltz