When Isabelle was born, we didn’t have a name picked out.  Through the course of the day right after her birth, we didn’t get a chance to try to figure one out, either.  I was hoping that we could that night.  But that night, we realized Ava would be too much for Tim’s mom to handle on her own, and the hospital would not allow Ava to stay with us in the hospital room, so Tim went home and we spent our first night apart in fourteen years.  It was hard for me, honestly, but there was grace in it, too.  As I sat awake for most of the night holding my baby girl, I prayed for a name.  Tim and I really were at an impasse, name-wise, and I was extremely discouraged and desperate for God’s guidance.  After a while, the name Isabelle Sophia – devoted to God; wise – settled in my heart.  I don’t know how to explain it other than it seemed right, which was fairly significant since neither name had been my preference.  When Tim arrived the next morning, I asked what he thought of the name, and his response was that it was exactly what he had been thinking.  That was it – she was named.  And I was thankful, in the end, for the timing.

Since then, I have gone through the inevitable struggle to not call her the names of our other children, and I think I’m now mostly through that phase.  She has acquired a few nicknames, however…most consistently Belle-belle, which is what Ava calls her, and Sweetpea, which was Tim’s attempt to have something to call her so that he wouldn’t inadvertently call her by any of Ava’s nicknames.  The others…Izzy-Soph and Izbo…were mostly just meant to be silly suggestions of possibilities, and really haven’t been said much, but do somehow seem to fit upon occasion.

Maybe a particular nickname will stick, maybe we will decide that ‘Isabelle’ is most suitable on its own…time will tell.  But whatever we call her, we are most happy to be able to call her ours.