Several people have asked us how Andria Grace got her name.
When we first started talking to Paige we asked her if she had been calling the baby a certain name and she said that she had been calling her Andi. But she wanted her to have a "proper" name so she decided that she wanted it to be Andria.
Of course we already had a different name picked out for our future child - Lacey Marie. This name had been chosen by us 16 years earlier when we had first started dating. When I pictured my future little girl in my mind her name was always Lacey. But, amazingly enough, when Paige said that her name was Andi it didn't hurt like I thought it might. That is just her name - we have never once considered changing it. And as I thought about how amazing it is that her name just fit I realized that that is how life is. You think that life is going to be a certain way and you have certain expectations for your future but then it doesn't happen that way. For instance, I thought I would have three kids by the time I was 25 years old. And then we didn't get Jacob until we had been married for eight years and I was 29. But what is really amazing is that even though those dreams for my future didn't come true, they were replaced by something even better than I imagined!
Paige had also said that she wanted Andi's middle name to mean something, like her middle name Charity. So I thought about that a lot and considered different names. I went to Time Out for Women up in Logan a week after we started emailing back and forth. Brent Top was there speaking and he gave a talk about the grace of God. I thought that I knew what that meant before then but when he gave his talk I really understood what it was and what it meant to me in my life. And then I was thinking about Paige and Josh and their situation and us and our situation in relation to the grace of God. And I thought...this is really what adoption is - you do all that you can do and then you hand it over to Him and He will see you through your struggle and pain and you will overcome it with His help, but not until you hand it over to Him. I know that applies to everything in our lives but at that moment I had an overwhelming feeling that Andi's middle name should be Grace. And then Cherie Call, one of my favorite LDS artists, sang a song about grace and I felt it again - that her middle name should be Grace.
So Andria Grace is the perfect name for a child that will come into this world as the result of many prayers of pleading and hope and faith on all of the many sides of the situation. She will be a blessing to all of her family members. We have already been blessed by knowing Paige and Josh and we are looking forward to sharing our family and lives with them.
When we first started talking to Paige we asked her if she had been calling the baby a certain name and she said that she had been calling her Andi. But she wanted her to have a "proper" name so she decided that she wanted it to be Andria.
Of course we already had a different name picked out for our future child - Lacey Marie. This name had been chosen by us 16 years earlier when we had first started dating. When I pictured my future little girl in my mind her name was always Lacey. But, amazingly enough, when Paige said that her name was Andi it didn't hurt like I thought it might. That is just her name - we have never once considered changing it. And as I thought about how amazing it is that her name just fit I realized that that is how life is. You think that life is going to be a certain way and you have certain expectations for your future but then it doesn't happen that way. For instance, I thought I would have three kids by the time I was 25 years old. And then we didn't get Jacob until we had been married for eight years and I was 29. But what is really amazing is that even though those dreams for my future didn't come true, they were replaced by something even better than I imagined!
Paige had also said that she wanted Andi's middle name to mean something, like her middle name Charity. So I thought about that a lot and considered different names. I went to Time Out for Women up in Logan a week after we started emailing back and forth. Brent Top was there speaking and he gave a talk about the grace of God. I thought that I knew what that meant before then but when he gave his talk I really understood what it was and what it meant to me in my life. And then I was thinking about Paige and Josh and their situation and us and our situation in relation to the grace of God. And I thought...this is really what adoption is - you do all that you can do and then you hand it over to Him and He will see you through your struggle and pain and you will overcome it with His help, but not until you hand it over to Him. I know that applies to everything in our lives but at that moment I had an overwhelming feeling that Andi's middle name should be Grace. And then Cherie Call, one of my favorite LDS artists, sang a song about grace and I felt it again - that her middle name should be Grace.
So Andria Grace is the perfect name for a child that will come into this world as the result of many prayers of pleading and hope and faith on all of the many sides of the situation. She will be a blessing to all of her family members. We have already been blessed by knowing Paige and Josh and we are looking forward to sharing our family and lives with them.
