The Girls Have Names!

Finishing up 25 weeks and it feels like the right time to publicly announce our name choices! Of course, we haven't exactly kept it a secret, and everyone who sees us on the regular already knows what the names will be. We actually chose them very early on, but I've kept it publicly under wraps for the most part, just in case we changed our minds at some point. It's sort of a big deal, choosing a name for someone and knowing that whatever I pick they're going to be stuck with for the rest of their lives. I hope they like them because I think they're absolutely beautiful.

All of the names, first and middle, are somehow connected to the family. Both me and my husband have Irish and Italian backgrounds, so we wanted one of the twins to have an Irish name and the other to have an Italian one. Rosalia Katherine is our little Italian girl. We got her first name from my Aunt Rosalie, but my husband heard the name Rosalia and thought it would be a good Italian alternative. He did not even know that it was my great grandmother's name when he suggested it, so of course I was sold. Katherine is after his aunt who unexpectedly passed just months before our wedding and would have been ecstatic to meet our little girls and be here for this exciting time in our life. She was really close to us and actually lived with him and his family for a lot of his life. We know she is still here with us in spirit and wanted to honor her memory as well.

Reilly Ellis was all me. Reilly is my maiden name, and although I'd toiled with this one because it has become so popular, I finally decided that I actually had the name first, and that it would be fitting for my child to have the name too. Ellis I came to by literally rattling off every other family name I could think of. It's partially after my late grandmother and her sculptor father, Joseph Bailey Ellis, but to be honest, I just loved the sound of the thing. Perhaps she'll get the artsy gene that somehow evaded me.

We aren't sure which twin is which yet. We want to wait until they come out to decide who looks more like Rosalia and who looks more like Reilly, so at least there will be one element of surprise!

More about the twins in the weekly updates below. Be back next week with a new update and an even bigger belly!