The name

I had a request from a great-grandparent to explain the origin of Brigid's
name. What follows here is my account of it, although I've no doubt that
I'll get several details wrong. Jessica can correct if she sees fit.

The short story goes like this: It was one of the few names that we could
both agree on for a girl.

The long story is a bit longer.

Once we found out that there was at least a possibility of him being a her
(or he being a she, for that matter) we decided that we should probably
agree on a girl's name too, just in case. This, however, was easier said
than done.

The are about 200 boys names that we could agree on, since there are about
that many Old Testament prophets &c whom we admire and could see naming a
child after.

Sadly, there are only about 3 women mentioned in the Bible (well, maybe
more than that) and none of them had names which:
a) We both like
b) We both can agree on the spelling for
c) Don't mean something horrible
d) Aren't the name of some whore of Babylon or some such thing.

Part of the problem comes from us having know so many people, many of whom
had good names, but who we didn't like. Bad associations can kill the
possibility of some really nice names, such as Lydia and Gamaliel.

Part of the problem, as mentioned above, was that we couldn't agree on how
to spell some of the names we both likes. Case in point: Catherine. Or
Katherine. Or Kathryn. Or...well, you get the idea.

Jessica has always liked the idea of naming a girl Elizabeth, partly in
honor of the saint (John the Baptist's mother) and partly in honor of her
own mother, Betsy. That's where Brigid's middle name came from. It would
have been first, but unfortunately, one of the best short forms of such a
name is Ellie, which would just make Ellie-Snellie-oh-so-smelly far to
easy. So we bumped that one back into second place.

That still left us with the problem of the first name, which is a far
bigger problem, seeing as how that's what most everyone in the world goes
by these days.

We bounced past a couple of really great names which didn't make the cut:
Jane - too short; Ekaterine - people would have trouble pronouncing it
(and Brigid is so much easier); Mary - too Theotokos.

Finally, one day, we were driving home in our car. (Just wait, there's a
point to this.) When Jessica first bought the car, she named it Brigid -
after the Irish saint to the poor - because it was green (very Irish) and
buying it made her poor. Very appropriate. Somewhere during the trip,
someone mentioned the name of the car, and we realized that we both
actually liked the name. Our first thought was, "You can't name a first
child after a car!" but we shortly decided that we would really be naming
her after a saint of old, which sounded like something we would have
wanted to do in the first place.

Thus, we give you Brigid Elizabeth, star of our eyes, and subject of many
a picture, conversation and e-mail.

-Adam