One Boy, One Girl

We had our gender reveal party this weekend and it was so much fun surprising our family with the babies' genders! We are THRILLED to announce that a little boy and little girl will be joining our family! I'm going to do an entire post about the party as soon as I get all the pictures from my mom. I was a little busy getting everything ready and forgot to take some of my own!

Jay and I have been asked several times about names. At first, I didn't really feel comfortable sharing the names. I didn't even feel right calling the babies by their names. Jay told a few people at the gender party what we were planning to name them. It was so weird for me to hear them calling our babies by the names. They are still just "the twins" or "the babies" to me. We had talked about names forever and our minds were pretty much set on what we wanted to name them. When we found out their genders I immediately started having second thoughts about names. I mean, these are theirs for the rest of their lives! Admittedly, I have terrible anxiety about actually making a decision when the time comes. I seem to know everything I want until the moment gets here and then I freak out a bit. I'm working on it though.

With that said, today I got the urge to order bags for us to take to the hospital (I know it is WAY early and I know I'm weird). I love the land's end boat totes and thought they would be a perfect way for us to keep up with all of our stuff. I like to be over-prepared and this solution made a lot of sense to me :) Anyway, if I'm going to order boat totes, they of course, must be monogrammed, and the babies need names in order to monogram things! So I pulled the trigger and ordered bags with their precious names embroidered. Now I know this is not the same as registering with social security and that I can still always change my mind (one of my friends decorated her entire nursery with her little boy's name only to change it as soon as he was born!) but I am so confident and excited with our choices! Without further chatter, the names we have chosen are Emerson Catherine (Emma Cate) for our baby girl and Caviness Holden (Holden) for our baby boy.

I knew that if we had a girl I wanted to use a double name. My best friend Mary Clare has a double name and I have always loved it! We knew that Catherine would be the middle name. It is a family name from my side and all the first born girls have Katherine or Catherine somewhere in their name. My Great Grandma's name was Katherine, my Grandma's name was Katherine Elizabeth, my Mom's Diane Catherine, mine Andrea Katherine, and my daughter will be Emerson Catherine. We also liked the name Emma but it is so common. I like formal names with nicknames and we both loved the name Emerson so there we go! Choosing  our son's name was a bit trickier. Jay is a second and for a while we discussed having a third; however, he really wanted to honor his maternal grandparents, who he is very close with, in the naming of our baby. We wanted to incorporate their last name, Caviness, into the baby's name but we couldn't think of any really good boyish nicknames so we decided he would go by something else. I've loved the name Holden since I read Catcher in the Rye in high school. Jay's dad's side of the family has a place at Holden beach and he absolutely loves it there! We easily agreed that our son would go by Holden.  

So there you have it! Welcome to our family Emma Cate and Holden!