Her name

It is always interesting to discover how a baby's name comes about...at least in our family! As we discussed it, Austin mentioned that all the other girls have the name of their Heavenly Mother, Mary, so she should too. But I suggested that since Austin and I both have Christ's name in ours (his middle name is Christopher) perhaps her middle name could too, not knowing that she would be born on the feast of the Holy Name! He insisted that if we did this she should have my name, so I humbly agreed and her middle name was pretty much decided as long as it sounded nice with her first name. Then, some sweet friends of ours had a baby and named her Felicity. Instantly, all the girls decided this was the name for our baby girl (they were really enamored by baby Felicity). Beautiful name, but I didn't really want her to have the same name as one of her friends growing up! Since St. Felicity's name is in the Eucharistic Prayer I of the mass, Allia decided perhaps Perpetua, Felicity's "sister saint" so to speak. But nobody especially liked that name. Then she suggested Anastasia, another name from the list of saints in the prayer. We didn't take it too seriously until I looked up Saint Anastasia and the meaning of her name. The name means "resurrection," and her feast day is actually celebrated in the second mass on Christmas Day. Like the other saints in that Eucharistic Prayer I, she was a martyr of the early Church. It went so beautifully with the middle name after Christ that we began to consider it. We had a few other favorites, and once she was born that one just kept coming back to us. It just fit so well with her birthday, so by the middle of the next day we decided that just had to be it! So now we have our little Anastasia Kristen, and Allia is so proud to have helped choose the name, actually for the second time. She helped with Gloria's name too!