The Grace of God

Well, I think that most everyone knows that we have now finally decided on Sophie's middle name. It will be Janina (pronounced Yanina...there is a "J" in the Polish alphabet, it is just said like a "Y") after my maternal grandmother.

Jon and I were at the doctor's office on Tuesday afternoon for our regular check-up. Dr. Swamy decided that she wanted to have a non-stress test (NST) done and was able to arrange for us to be worked in. Basically, I was hooked up with dopplers on my tummy to monitor the twins' heatbeats for a continuous 20-minute time period.

They had a baby name book there, so we were looking through it to look for "A" names for my sister and Mike. They don't know what they are having (i.e., boy or girl), but the Jewish tradition is to name the first baby born in the family after the last person who passed away in the family. The interesting part of the tradition is that you don't use the exact name, just the letter. The last person who passed away in the family was Mike's father, Alan...hence, they need an "A" name. Well, they are hard customers, and it is not as easy as you would think!!! They don't like any of the obvious, common ones (i.e., Andrew, Ashley, etc.); Aaron is Mike's middle name; we all liked Ariel, but Tara and Mike said that it reminded them of The Little Mermaid; likewise, we liked Aayden, but their good friends just named their son that; I thought that I had a flash of brillance and suggested Adrienne, but that got nixed since they live in Philly (too many "Yo, Adrienne, jokes"), etc. The conversation then degraded into silliness...how 'bout Atlas, Adonis, Aphrodite, etc., etc.

Anyway, I digress. We started out looking to help Tara and Mike and were quite impressed with this book. We couldn't resist looking up the girls' names and seeing if this book said something different than that which we had already found out. Not at all for Jacqueline, Carol, or Sophie. But, for the first time ever, we were able to find Janina. It turns out that it means "God has been gracious." Well, of course, I almost started to cry...

Now that I know this, I feel that Sophie is destined to be named Janina. Not only do I have such fond memories of my Babcia and am sometimes very sad that she passed away so early in my life (when I was a young teen), but I also believe that God has been gracious to us. Despite everything that has happened to us and how long things took and everything we had to endure to get to this point, we feel so incredibly blessed to have TWO beautiful, healthy girls coming into our lives soon. Although we knew we would be parents one way or another, we feel even more blessed to be able to go through pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, etc. ourselves. We know all too well that things could have turned out quite differently and not everyone is so blessed.

We pray that God will continue to be gracious to us and our little family. We pray that the Grace of God will shine down on all of our friends and family who continue to struggle with their journey to parenthood.