How Our Baby Got Her Name

wearing one of our outfits from Miss Sarah!

We love Gemma's name, and thought you might like to know where it came from. :-)

I've loved the name Grace since college. Oddly, more than one person there got my name wrong and called me Grace instead; apparently there was a Grace Reidy who graduated shortly before I came, and my maiden name is Gretchen Reid. :-) I liked it, painted it as my nickname on my intramural basketball shirt (go flying squirrels!), and mentally filed it away as a favorite baby name for someday. And what better thing to to name a child after than God's beautiful, abundant, saving grace in Christ, which He lavished on even me?

Then, I re-met and married John, and now I have a dear mom-in-law whose middle name is Grace! We both liked that we'd be naming our daughter after her, too.

One of my best friends in college was a foreign exchange student from Northern Ireland. Of course she missed home and the person she most often spoke of missing was her sister, Gemma. Gemma was the only other Christian in her family, and the one who had led her to Christ. I was endeared to Gemma through Jenni, and when my brother and I visited Northern Ireland about a year later, we learned first-hand that she's just the sweet, godly woman we expected to find.

I love the name because it's not strange but not common and because it's more common in the UK than it is here (and I love, love Northern Ireland!). Our little daughter now has two godly women for her name-sakes, and how earnestly I pray that she will early receive the grace of her grandmother and the grace of Gemma from Ireland.