Two Nadias

Paul and I had several criteria we considered when choosing the names of our children. Some people give all their children a name that starts with the same letter (one of my sisters has give all her kids "J" names), and some try to use family names. We didn't do either for our three kids, although if we had another daughter she would have been Deborah Marie (named after Paul's aunt and my mom). We wanted a name that would be easy to spell and pronounce, a name we both liked (that was the hardest criteria as we had very different tastes!), and one that wasn't too popular. We used the social security website where the rank the popularity of each name to help us with that criteria. I also cared about the meaning of the names, although this was definitely the least important factor for us (Paul didn't care about that at all). The meaning I liked the best was Nadia Renee as Nadia means "hope" and Renee means "reborn" and my hope of becoming a mom was certainly reborn during her pregnancy. I was a bit concerned after Ian was born because he was one of three Ian's in the NICU. Over the past six years we've only come across one other child named Oliver (a colleague of mine at work had named one of his three kids Oliver prior to us naming our son Oliver) and one other child named Nadia. I haven't kept track of how many Ian's we've come in contact with, but it hasn't happened too many times that another Ian has been in Ian's class. There was an Ian in Nadia's swimming class once, for example.

Four years ago we were at the playground and I called out to Nadia, and another mom turned to me and questioned how I knew her daughter's name. I said I don't know your daughter's name. It was then we discovered there were two Nadias on the playground. It hadn't happened again until Nadia started the Level 2 gymnastics class on Mondays from 4:00-5:30. There is another Nadia in her class! This really tickled her funny bone that the teachers had to call her Nadia Kennedy to distinguish between the two. Nadia kept telling me, "and she spells her name the same way too, mommy!" I find it a bit ironic that the setting for having two Nadias in one class is at a gymnastics class in light of the famous Nadia Comaneci. For all I know, this girl in her class could be the same one from the playground a few years ago. The other girl would be almost seven years old now.