Her name.

I know it may seem a little early to land on a name, but it felt like forever to me.  So I say we have landed on her name, but I guess nothing is actually official until it is written on a birth certificate.  And even then, pay 50 bucks and you can change that too.  Stephen and I have very different opinions on cute girl names, so there are only a small few that we both actually like.  So we picked Blakely because we both liked it.  I knew a girl in high school named Blakely, and I mentioned it to Stephen and he LOVED it.  So since he loved it, I loved it.  So that's her name. 

The middle name has a little better story.  We decided a long time ago that we wanted to use family names for the middle name.  And not just a random Gertrude that just sounds good with the first name.  We wanted to pick names from people in our family that have qualities that we hope our children have.  We have several people on the middle name list, but it should come as no surprise that my mom was one of the front runners.  Her middle name is Lynn. 

My mom is a person of extremes.  I don't mean that she is particularly adventurous or that she takes risks or does much that is really all that exciting (sorry, Mom).  I mean that the characteristics she has, she has them to an extreme.  One of my favorite examples of this is her bedtime.  An understatement about my mom would be that she is not a night person.  By that, I actually mean she goes to bed around 9pm.  I'm not exaggerating, ask my dad.  So when my mom goes to bed early, and she does more often than you'd think, that means she goes to bed BEFORE 9pm.  I definitely hope Blakely inherits this great quality of going to bed early.  However, the characteristics that actually made us want to name Blakely after my mom are her hard work, sacrifice, and generosity.  She is all of these things to an extreme. 

The best example I have is our hangout spot in highschool.  All mine and my brother's friends hung out at our house all through high school.  We didn't have a particularly amazing house.  It wasn't big.  But we did have a few items that made it easy for us and all our friends to hang out.  We had a basketball goal, and a trampoline.  But more important than these things were those characteristics my mom had.  She always had an unlimited supply of cokes and food.  Any of our friends could come over at any time.  My mom was so welcoming that many times our friends would end up sitting at the kitchen table hanging out with my parents instead of us.  During the summer, our friends would stay at our house well into the middle of the night.  This was a sacrifice for my mom since she goes to bed at 9pm and our house is small.  I am sure she could hear everything that went on.  All the while my friends and I were freeloading off my mom's generosity, she was also taking care of my younger brother, Micah, who is deaf and mentally retarded, while also keeping up with a full time job. 

My mom is the hardest working, most serving, most generous person I know.  I could go on about the money that she spends on other people and the things she does for our family.  And my dad is obviously a generous person too, but I think he was lucky enough to have my mom rub off on him (no offense, Dad!).  I know that everyone in our family would say, including Micah (if he could talk), that we are all better people because of my mom.  I wonder if my mom always slept through our ruckus or if she would ever just lay awake listening to the ridiculous conversations teenagers have.  Now that I am going to be a mom, I really hope that we can make a home where Blakely Lynn and her friends want to hangout all the time, and I think at least sometimes I'll stay awake and listen.