A little more about our son’s name and how we came up with it…

Kieran (KEER-en) is an Irish name meaning Little Dark One, derived from the Gaelic Ciarán, which is from ciar (black, dark), a word meaning “dark-haired”. A dark-haired child.

Josiah (Joe-SIGH-uh) is a Hebrew name meaning God Helps or God Saves.

We literally started with a website that lists nearly 6,000 names and started culling them down. We used “most popular” name lists to cull out even more names, as we didn’t want our son to be one of four Noahs in his kindergarten class. We read article after article on what to look for to make sure the name was a good one. We thought of potential nicknames and schoolyard taunts (of which we think there are few for this name, actually.) And we talked about it. We made spreadsheets combining our potential names into first and middle name combinations and then traded sheets to see what the other was rating as their favorites. And we talked about it some more. We had a final list of about 14 first and middle name combinations that we kept with us and pulled out at every meal to just read over together and get used to saying. We had our favorites as we arrived at the hospital but wanted to see what our little guy looked like before settling on a forever name.

And even still, it took us until the next evening as we shared our special surf & turf dinner together courtesy of the hospital that we arrived at Kieran Josiah. (Don’t get too excited, it was still hospital food…) We love how unique it is, we love that googling it doesn’t bring up and bad people, we love that St. Kieran of Ireland seemed like a good guy, we love how it sounds as we discuss our son.

(And no, to those who know me and are making assumptions about where the middle name came from – our son isn’t named after anyone, real or fictional. Really.)