What's in a name?...

The girl's name Tess \t(e)-ss\
is a variant of Teresa (Greek),
Tessa (English) and Theresa (Greek),
and the meaning of Tess is "late summer".

I must have been about five months pregnant the day my hubby came home after work and told me he had come up with the perfect name for our upcoming bundle of joy. He was in awe at the sheer beauty of this most wondrous name. "It brought a tear to my eye when I thought of it.", was what he told me before laying it on me.

Now what you need to understand about my hubby and me is that we are total opposites. On just about everything. And he had tried to choose names for our other two girls as well. Utter failures. Both times he tried. Now, for fear of offending a reader or two, I will not tell you the names he had come up with. Suffice it to say that with the names he had picked out, the only future I could envision for them was becoming a hooker and claiming their "turf" on a street corner somewhere calling out.."Hey there handsome! Ya lookin' for a good time?". Uh, no.

He thought I was terribly unfair because both Blake and Ellie were names I had chosen. I wanted straight forward, simple names. And as my brother-in-law, Richard, so wisely told me, "give them a name that you can quickly yell out at them when you are mad." Good advice. My hubby however, preferred names with a bit more, well...slut to them. You know the ones.

So you can probably understand why I was nervous when he got ready to present me with this most wondrous name. Then he laid it on me...

Tess Oasis

Clearly, I loved the name Tess and was very impressed that he had come up with it but OASIS???? Uhm, ewww! I said, something along the lines of, she isn't a mirage in the desert! She is a baby! He was so offended. He just could not wrap his brain around the idea that I did not like it.

"But it is so beautiful! Think about what it means, Joanna. An oasis is a place of serenity and beauty.", he said, trying desperately to rationalize this most heinous of names. No thank you. But we did agree on Tess and agreed to try to come up with another middle name that we could both agree on. Fat chance!

A week before my due date, due to health issues I was having, the OB/GYN was going to try to induce me. By this point he had another name that he liked and I had one that I liked. Never the twain shall meet.

He liked Orion (yes, as in Orion's Belt) and I liked Joanne (I was named for my grandmother, Joanne and wanted the tradition to continue). We could not agree.

Anyway, while I was laying in the hospital bed getting hooked up to pitocin to induce labor Charlie tried to recruit a little help. He said to the nurse, "Don't you think that Tess Orion sounds much better together than Tess Joanne?"

Before the nurse could answer, I jumped in with, "Can you imagine naming your poor child after a constellation of stars! That's all anybody will ever think of when they hear her name. Kids on the playground will tease her! It's stupid!"

The nurse looked at me and then at Charlie and said, "My middle name is Orion".

Can you hear the crickets chirping in the silence that followed? I could. Oh my God, how was I going to salvage this situation. My foot was so far in my mouth that my toes were showing out my butt. I mean really? What were the odds? It was just so unbelievable.

I looked to my hubby for a little help here. He was grinning like the Cheshire Cat. I wanted to reach over and slap him. I looked to the nurse and said something extremely stupid like how she was probably Irish so the name Orion was perfect and how it wouldn't make sense if you weren't Irish and blah blah blah. I really got caught up in the whole Irish thing as my excuse. The nurse, bless her, said yes she was Irish and it was an old family name. We quickly changed topics.

Oh, and since Karma is a , well you know, I spent the entire day having contractions but walked out of the hospital that night still pregnant. Figures.

And in case you are wondering, it is Tess Joanne Reidy, thank you very much...