The Name Game

Leslie started this game yesterday, and Ginger tagged me, so here's the question and my answers:

What did you name your kids and why?

(With each pregnancy, we have chosen not to find out the baby's gender before it's born, so we had to come up with two names each time.)

Bentley John - When I was pregnant with Bentley, I had a long list of names that I'd started before we got married. John didn't really like most of them, so we started over. I put a notepad by the computer in our apartment and started a list titled "Baby Names." Bentley was the one and only name that John contributed to the list. I thought it had a nice sound to it, and that it would be cool to tell our little boy that his Dad picked his name. The middle name, John, is of course after John. :)
If we had had a girl, she would have been Emily (what my parents planned to name my little sister until their two year old - me - preferred the name Mindy).

Maxwell Larry - Max is a name that I've liked for years, but I didn't really consider it as a name for one of our kids until after we had Bentley. I thought Maxwell complemented Bentley's name, (my brother says they're "butler" names) and I liked the association with Elder Maxwell. My Dad's name is Garth Larry, and most of the time he is known by his middle name(when he isn't called by his even more common nickname -Homely). I wanted to name this baby after my Dad, so we chose Larry. Somehow it seemed more acceptable than Homely, even though that was what I grew up thinking my Dad's name was. :)
If we had had a girl this time, she would have been Nora, which I got from Lorna, the name of my maternal grandmother.

Jonah Dail - For our first two children, I'd wanted to avoid "J" names. When John and I introduced ourselves to people, they'd say, "John and Jenny, how cute," because both our names started with a J - like we'd planned it our something. :) By the third baby, I thought we'd be safe to consider J names. Early on in the pregnancy, we decided on Ruby for a girl (Ruby May Maxfield is one of John's Great-grandmothers, and we like the name). We had more difficulty with boys' names, and I was pretty sure the baby was a girl. While we weren't too worried about it, I still wanted a boys name for backup. One night I was browsing baby names online and decided to look at the J list. Jonah stood out right away, and John approved it, so that became our backup, "just in case" we had a boy. :) We wanted to name this baby (if it was a boy) after John's Dad, Brent Dail. We chose Dail because a) it was his middle name and we'd used my Dad's middle name with Maxwell, b) Andrew was already "Brent", and c) it is also John's middle name, as well as the middle name of his Grandfather.

Baby #4 - This time we're waiting to see what the baby looks like before narrowing our lists to one boy or one girl name, but I do have middle names picked out. For a girl, the middle name is Jeanette - my middle name, my paternal grandmother's middle name, and my great-grandmother's middle name. For a boy, the middle name will be Fisher, after my Great Grandpa John Floyd Fisher. I was lucky enough to live two blocks away from him until I went to college, so I knew him well and love him very much. He died during my second year of college, almost 10 years ago, and I decided then that I wanted to name a son after him. My brother "called" the name Floyd, and we already have a John, so I chose Fisher. Hopefully we'll get at least one more boy, and I'll get to use the name. :)

I like baby names about as much as birth stories, so this ended up being longer than I thought it would - s0rry. :)

I tag Cleo, Elizabeth, and Lara.