What's in a Name

We have gotten a lot of questions, quite justifiably, about how we came up with Inessa's name. After all, hardly anyone has heard of it.

We started out with a set of criteria that we use for naming all of the kids.
1. interesting, preferably spiritually oriented meaning
2. alliterative first and middle names
3. classic or traditional but not particularly common; naming statistics over the last 100 years gets consulted frequently
4. fits in reasonably well with the other kids' names
5. contains a nature reference that may be somewhat obscure; Elanor is a flower from LOTR and Peter means rock
6. doesn't sound too weird with our last name; everyone else's last name sounds so much easier to match than one's own--but they feel exactly the same way.
7. Minimal unfortunate nicknames. This is impossible to avoid entirely of course--someone will always think of something.

Jonathan starts connecting with the baby by browsing through name lists pretty much as soon as we know that we are expecting. I prefer to wait until we know the gender to start narrowing things down. So around the beginning of January, we were both on the hunt.  Irene had been on our short list of girls' names for Elanor because Jonathan liked the meaning (peace or peaceful) and I had liked it ever since reading George MacDonald's Princess and Curdie as a child. We went through some lists to find another name starting with I to match it, coming up with some real gems like Iphigenia, Ingeborg and the oh, so popular, Isabella. We were starting to wonder if either Irene wasn't a good choice or we would have to drop one of our criterion.
When I came across Inessa, I was initially hesitant because I had never heard it before--something that Jonathan has had trouble accepting in the past. However, the sound was lovely and the meaning was interesting--it is the Slavic variant of Agnes, which means pure or chaste. More people have heard of Inez or Ines which is the Spanish version. Jonathan liked it so we rolled Irene Inessa around in our mouths and ears for a few days. After a while, it occurred to us to switch the names and we both decided that we liked the sound of Inessa better as the first name.
In the final part of the evaluation process, we did a search for Inessa to check to make sure that there weren't any terribly unpleasant associations or people with that name. When first item that came up was a link for a butterfly entomology site, we discovered that Inessa is a genus of skipper butterflies--a perfect way to fit in that nature reference and one last confirmation that this was the right name for her.
We planned to call her Nessie but didn't think of Miss Loch Ness Monster until after she was born and the paperwork submitted but I don't think that we would have changed our minds at that point anyway.

And after all that, Ellie insists on calling her Nugget.

Peanut and Nugget