"unusual without being weird"

Vesper: Latin, meaning evening prayers
Eileen: Gaelic, meaning pleasant

We had a very, very short list of girl names, and one solid boy name that we'll reserve for the potential of actually getting to use it in the future (it's both Biblical and familial, and that's all you get unless you ask in person). One thing Rob felt strongly about was having Taylor as a middle name, to honor his mother's side of the family, as it's her maiden name.

Truthfully, the only girl name I even remember from our super-short list is Charlotte, but we didn't love it enough and weren't committed to it. Then I recalled a character from a book series I'd read back in middle school. Her name was Vesper Holly. I won't say that our daughter is named after her, but recently getting that series in hardcover from PaperbackSwap sparked my memory. Vesper Lynd is also a Bond girl and the Vesper is a Bond martini, but the film version of Casino Royale came out AFTER I had decided I'd really liked the name (I have it written down somewhere as a potential girl's name, on something that predates Rob and possibly even big Blake).

Then we tried the three names together: Vesper Taylor Bedford. And it had too many ER sounds. Rob liked Vesper too, enough to suggest that he bend on his grandparents' last name and go with his grandmother's first name instead: Eileen. I looked up the origin and meaning of two names, decided it made us sound more holy than we were, and we had a name we loved! As one friend put it, it's unusual without being weird, which is what we were going for. After all, until a certain British pop star came around, Adele had the benefit of being unusual without being weird, and I've almost always appreciated that fact.

Now I'm getting used to actually USING the name... which is hard. I have called this baby Marilla or biscuit for so long that using and hearing the name Vesper is a bit startling! I also find myself adding many names that are not actually her middle name to the mix: Vesper Lynn (my mom's middle name, but it's too much like the Bond girl and "West Berlin") and Vesper Grace (a different spelling of Bethany's middle name) are a few.

I absolutely refuse to get lazy, however, and lapse into Vespa. My beautiful little girl is not a motor scooter that doesn't top 35 MPH. I'd rather call her Harley.