A Tess By Any Other Name

Many of you have asked where we got the name Tess.  No, it was not Tess of the d'Urbervilles.  (Or Touched By An Angel, which I have never seen but someone brought up today.)  It's a little bit more random than that.

Originally we were going to name her Alex.  Cute and spunky, right?  But the more I thought about it the more I knew this wasn't her name.  Plus, I wasn't so sure about giving her a name that could be for a boy or a girl when she already had 3 brothers.

I told Lance that we needed to find another name.  I don't know if he really believed me or not; I think he thought I'd come back around to Alex.  (Am I right, Lance, or am I just making things up?)

So I got to work looking for a new name.  No luck; I couldn't find anything I liked for quite a while.  Then one night while I was online I saw a random ad for babynamegenie.com.  Thoroughly convinced it would be a complete waste of my time I of course went to the site.

Tess was the third name it suggested.

The moment I saw it I knew it was her name.

Lance wasn't as easily convinced.  Too bad I'm the one who fills out the birth certificate form.  (Okay, if he had REALLY hated it I would have rethought things.  But he didn't so I didn't and now here we are.)

Also -

Spencer was really and truly put out that we wouldn't tell him the baby's name.  (Sorry, future Spencer who is reading this, but if we had told you the whole world would have known within minutes.)

So I decided to do something fun to make it up to him.  On the morning we left for the hospital I left an envelope with this on front on the kitchen table:

Inside the envelope was this page cut into puzzle pieces. 

I think the boys (and grandpa and grandma) enjoyed learning the baby's name this way and just before everyone else.  (Even if it was just a few hours earlier!)