When George and I decided to create the Name Game of scrambled baby name letters we had NO idea how seriously everyone would take it, how much fun it would be, or that it would even be possible to be cracked.  We apparently did not give you all enough credit!  The first two days after we posted it, two of my work friends, Gina and Mary, collaborated and started working to unscramble those letters.  I remember that on the first day, we had a lot of meetings and I would see Gina discreetly scribbling letters on a tablet as she crossed letters out and re-wrote them.  She was determined that the Name Game would not beat her!  To my surprise, Gina and Mary cracked the code within a day.  So, Gina and Mary are declared the winners of the Name Game!

Mary is an Occupational Therapist and Gina is a Speech Language Pathologist who work with me. Together we make a great team!

Here is some of Gina and Mary’s scratch paper. They may have cracked the code, but it was no easy feat!

We also have a few honorable mentions to announce.  By the end of the week, two more of my friends, Melissa and Nekedria had it figured out as well.  It turns out that Nekedria had an ulterior motive, you see she likes to give monogrammed baby gifts so knowing the name is critical for her!  My parents and sister, Courtney, got it within the weekend.  The funny thing is that my friends seemed to work together while my family had an “It’s every man for himself approach”.  Mom would not even give Dad clues.  We can be pretty competitive so I think they wanted to see who would get it first, and also having the pride in knowing they didn’t get help.  So, since so many of you cracked the code, we decided we might as well release the names.  Here it goes….

Baby A

Rylin Skye

Baby B

Harper Stone

Baby C

Sydney Raine

Baby D

Mason River

Here’s how we came up with the names.  For first names, we essentially chose names we just like.  We tried to choose names that weren’t terribly common, but also not “out there”, and names that would be cute for babies but would also become nice adult names. We also wanted each first name to be unique from the others.  That meant no rhyming, same first initial, or similar ending.  That got a little tricky because we’d inevitably think of two names that were similar, so one would get scrapped.  And, finally, NO family names.  George is a 4th so we decided long ago to end that tradition.  Having multiple people with the same name together gets confusing and we’ve learned it also affects things like your credit score!  Not to mention the fact that we didn’t want any family member feeling left out if their name wasn’t chosen.  Within a few days, however, we had all four names chosen.  I think it may have been easier choosing four than one.  You see we didn’t have to come to an agreement on just one name.  We both got to suggest more than one!

You will notice that the middle names have a common thread, they are all nature related.  It started out that because of our journey to have children I wanted to use “Hope” and “Faith” for the girls.  They just weren’t working with first names and that left the boys without similar middle names.  We then decided that rather than spiritual names, we wanted to choose names close to nature and in turn close to God.  Ironically, we did not directly plan this, but all four middle names can be found in the first two chapters of Genesis.  My mom discovered that during one of her insomniac moments when she decided to pray.  So there you have it, we hope you like the babies’ names.  (Please don’t tell us if you hate them, or give us your two cents because they are chosen now!  That is, unless you love them.)

hugs!

Amber