The story behind the names...

My boss was wondering if Etta was named after Etta James and in fact she partly is!  I sent her this lengthy explanation of the girl's names and then decided I should post it so everyone knows the stories!  


Part of the reasoning behind Etta's name is after Etta James!  I LOVE her and Pete even took me on a surprise date to see her at the MN State Fair a few years ago.  I am so glad we decided to name her Etta...we had Elsie Susan (Susan is after my mom) picked for sure the minute we knew we were having girls.  Elsie is just a name I've always adored.  We were planning on naming Etta either Isabelle and calling her Izzy for short for the first few weeks after finding out her sex but then I decided it was way too common.  So then, we switched to Addison around week 24 and planned on calling her Addie.  But a few days before I ended up on bed rest I woke up in the early morning around 5 and couldn't sleep because I decided I wasn't in love with the name and it was WAY too common.  I woke up Pete and he said he understood because we both had had many run-ins with little girl Addison's for the past several weeks.  So, I got on my phone and was searching names and then the name just came to me...and I knew it was the one.  Another neat aspect of her name is that when I was on bed rest at the hospital every time the girls would get monitored via the sensors strapped to my belly, baby b (or Etta) would kick, move, etc and always take forever to track her heart rate!  She even kicked the sensors off my belly several times!  I started calling her my little Houdini because she was so tricky to find.  One nurse said, oh you could call her Harriet (similar to Harry for Harry Houdini).  Then, when I was researching what Etta's name meant, I saw that it was derived from the names Harriet or Henrietta!  And Henrietta was Pete's great grandma's name!  Also, Etta means "Pearl" or "Little One"...how fitting because she is my little one, born first (even though she was supposed to be born second) at 3lbs 12 oz.  Elsie means "noble" or "my God is a vow/oath"...and noble is kind of how she has been acting all along...more patient than Etta to get out, much less fidgety in my belly and now since birth.  So, that's the story of their names...we love them :-)