I wanted to take a moment to talk about the genesis of Brennan’s name, and how we feel that his name was chosen for him by his older brother.

Let me preface this post by stating that I am not a spiritual or religious person.  Neither is B’s Mom.  I have a really practical/analytical personality.  New age, spiritual, mystical, power of prayer, etc. are things that I basically roll my eyes at, so it is difficult for me to talk about Brennan’s name in the way I’m about to.  I don’t believe in guardian angels, divine intervention, and so on and so forth.  I am, and will always be, a skeptic.

Yet I know with absolute certainty that Finn had a hand in choosing Brennan’s name.

After the second ultrasound with Brennan, Chief Medical Officer Mom was still concerned that everything was going to fall apart and needed reassurance.  As we were leaving the clinic, we drove past a red truck in the parking garage with a license plate that said, simply, “Finn” – no numbers even, just the four letters.  All winter, the CMO had said that every cardinal was a sign of Finn, and I’ve come to associate the color red with him as well.  It’s difficult for me to describe my feelings about this occurrence – wanting to believe in a sign, but looking for rational explanations.

As the pregnancy progressed, we began discussing names.  As I once talked about Finn’s naming on his blog, so I will link to our spreadsheet of possibilities here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QMCWHxAMJIePJujFgdcn7dQMoS1JGArZBaYEoVONXGE/edit?usp=sharing

After the anatomy scan, we began earnestly “testing” out various male names we had compiled.  We gravitated towards Irish surnames as we had with our firstborn.  We really liked Alistair quite a bit, especially Alec as a nickname, but kept getting hung up on the exact spelling of it (and that it was not Irish in origin).  Brennan was one of the names we liked initially because Cheryl referred to the fetus as “Baby B”.

In mid January we had the following conversation:

After Alistair, we tested out Brennan towards the end of January.  On February 8, I received the following “like” of my work homepage:

I had never heard of this company before, which is a construction business that has nothing to do with libraries and isn’t even located near where I live and work.  There was no reason for them to “like” my work page.  After this email, I was convinced that we had our name, although the CMO needing more convincing.  She would get it.

After this incident, I had an issue with a catalog record at work that I had to send to the CMO to fix.  It was for the “Cedar Cove” television show, and one of the actors was Brennan Elliott.  I feel that Brennan is an uncommon enough name that it was fairly significant that I had to send her a record with this name attached to it within a week or so of the Facebook occurrence.  Later, I would run into another issue with this very same DVD when another library contacted me about having one of their patrons request it even though we weren’t putting it on interlibrary loan yet, as if to dispel any doubt about Brennan.

I suddenly kept seeing the name everywhere.  However, there were two more significant events that finally convinced the CMO that Brennan was it.  My sisters like to reference the movie “Step Brothers” to each other, and  because of this, one week the CMO decided to borrow the DVD from the library.  One of the brothers is named Brennan.  Shortly after that, the CMO drove home from work one day and noticed a chiropractor office she hadn’t seen before: The Brennan Family Chiropractic and Nutrition Center, which is located 1 mile from her job (http://www.brennanhealth.com/).

I don’t know why I believe Finn reached out to tell us Brennan’s name, and to let us know everything would be fine.  The rational part of my brain explains that these are just coincidences, however improbable.  And perhaps my own healing from this last year comes simply from a need to believe in something like this in order to survive and continue on, so I seek out the random coincidences.  For the first time in my life, I am comfortable with this “spiritual” thing, and I know that Brennan’s name was chosen for him, not by his parents, but by his brother, the Mighty Jedi Finn.

Admiral Dad