Nursery
Of course, if you are a Facebook regular or have been to our house, you've seen pictures of the nursery or seen it in person, but if you are not and have not, here are the final pics of her nursery. And, even if you have seen it, in person or on Facebook, I've added in a few details that should make the pictures slightly more interesting.
The Noah's Ark hanging was the final of the gifts from Evie's secret admirer who had sent us little goodies during the pregnancy. Turned out that the secret admirer was Genie Matthews, a lovely lady from First Presbyterian Church in Somerville who used to sit next to me in the alto section of the choir. She got the idea to send us secret gifts from when she got married; apparently someone did this to her before her wedding and she loved the idea.
The white bookshelf was in my Dad's room when he was a child. Mom brought it up for us the day before Evie was born, and she put all of the various goodies on it which include: the deflated balloon from the baby shower at Grace Presbyterian Church; a party hat that says "Princess Mayne" that was the topper for the diaper cake at that shower, a variety of books including the shower guest book and a memory/keepsake book, and a bunch of picture frames for which I need to order pictures.
And in this corner... the nightstand on the left my Mom purchased (thanks, Granna!) which gave us somewhere to put her elephant lamp. The dresser belonged to Evie's great-great-grandfather (my Dad's Dad's Dad) and we're using it as her changing table. And of course, we have the diaper stacker, valances, and hamper that goes with her bedding set. And on either side of the dresser are cast iron hooks that are shaped like elephants that Seth and I spray painted white.
Here we have her crib (thanks, Grammy!) and her mobile. The quilt above it was made by my best friend's mother-in-law, Susan Smith. She didn't know what colors we were going with in the nursery, so it was quite a coincidence that the greens and pinks she used in the quilt matched the nursery so well. And there's a white basket full of stuffed animals and another quilt (made by the mother of a friend of mine from UCI) which we frequently use for tummy time.
And of course the mural with the mommy and daddy elephants and the baby elephant in pink. Seth and I got this idea from a picture we saw of two elephants making a heart with their trunks. We found three different images of elephants from the internet and pieced together one image, then we split the image into ninths (due to our inability to get the projector to show the whole image any larger) and projected each ninth onto the wall and painted the outline of the elephants. Then we went back and filled them in and added in a few more details (eyes, outlines for ears, etc).
So that's her nursery. There are a few more things that have been added since these pictures were taken, like her Noah's ark mezuza from Grammy, but I haven't retaken pictures.
Name
As for her name, I'll share all the names we considered since if we have another daughter, none of those names will be in the running. We had been kicking around a list of names for years, and Evelyn was on that list. But when we started thinking of names for Evie, we threw them all out and started over so we could think about it for this specific child.
We planned to give her names that would make her initials E.R. This is because if/when we have a boy, we'll be keeping Seth's family tradition of using the father's first name as the son's middle name, so we thought we'd give Evie my initials so that I would be represented in our daughter's name somehow. We went through several E names, and each of us lost our first pick because the other vetoed it. My favorite was Elsa, which is the German form of Elizabeth (Elizabeth meaning "God's promise"), and Seth's favorite was Estelle for its connection to stars. However, we couldn't agree on either of these names, so we went on to our next 2 choices which were Evelyn and Eleanor, and we both liked both of them as first names. So we went with those, thinking we'd probably know which she looked and acted like more when she arrived.
For middle names, we had a really hard time because there were very few R names that were appealing to us. We could only agree on Ruby, which we liked for its quaintness and its reference to a precious gem (we considered this baby very precious), and Roxanne, which we liked for its uniqueness (not having been in the top 1000 names in a long time) and because it contained the name Ann which is my mom's middle name, so it would be somewhat honorific of her. We'd decided on either Evelyn Ruby or Eleanor Roxanne, but we still felt like they didn't really click.
Nickname-ability has always been important to us, and we had decided that if we went with Evelyn, she would be nicknamed Evie. About a week before she was born, Seth and I were discussing our R middle names and decided that we didn't really like them enough to make them stick. It felt like they were just names we'd agreed we could agree upon given the initials we'd chosen, and we felt like they didn't have enough importance. So, in thinking about going with Evelyn and the nickname Evie, Seth jokingly said it would be funny if her initials were E.V. so that her nickname and her initials would be the same, similar to my nickname of Em and my initials being E.M. We looked through V names and loved Victoria instantly. Victoria means victory, and what better middle name for a little girl we'd been wanting to conceive for a long time? Pairing that with Evelyn which is an anglicized version of Aibhilin, an Irish name that means "wished for" or "longed-for child" made so much sense and we loved it instantly.
So we went in with Eleanor as a possibility, but we were pretty sure we were going with Evelyn Victoria unless the name just did not fit her at all. But, we felt that it did once we met her, and now that she is here, I can't imagine her being Elsa or Estelle or Eleanor. She's all Evie to me.
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