Reader Questions - Part 1

Our first question comes from RRMama - I bet she didn't realize the answer would take up an entire blog post!

I know at some point you want children but do you have their names picked out and do you want boys or girls??


Girls are so much fun to shop for! Their clothes are cuter, their toys are more fun, and they are easier to relate to (for me at least.)

I joked that if either of my sister’s kids was a boy (she didn’t know the gender for either till they popped out) I was sending them back. For all my kidding, my nephew is a cutie whom I love dearly.

While for most people this is just a fun idea to bat around, I also have the added pressure of being married to a man with a genetic blood disorder. Hemophilia is carried on the X chromosome, but is a disease only guys can have. That means none of our children can get it from Jay. (Its in my family too, but that’s a completely different set of charts and graphs).

*Puts on Science teacher glasses*

Since its carried on the X, if we were to have a boy – he would get my X and Jay’s Y. And the disease wouldn’t be passed. We could pass it along if we had a girl – she would get an X from each of us. She couldn’t have the disease, but would be a carrier and would have the potential to give it to any sons she might have.

The chance of us having a girl, who has a son, who gets his grandfather’s crappy chromosome, is possible but not incredibly likely.

Jay’s mother (who knows firsthand how worrisome it is to care for a hemophiliac child) is already praying for little boys. I have no doubt that God will take care of my family no matter what. (Because I’ve seen it in my family – my hemophiliac grandfather had two girls – once of which was my grandmother, who had 3 girls – one of which was my mother, who had 2 girls. So far it hasn’t turned up yet.)

On to the fun part – the names.

If I have a boy I’d like to name him Cade. Funny I haven’t even mentioned that to Jay yet. I know it sounds a little romance novelesque, but driving into Cades Cove one afternoon I thought that would be a great name. And cool for the kid to know he was named after a place that was special to his mommy and daddy.

For a girl Ella Rae – I loved my great-grandmother dearly, and her name was Ellen. That’s a little old fashioned these days, but I would love a piece of her being represented in my daughter. Rae for my grandfather’s brother. He died storming the beaches of Normandy. He wasn’t married, and had no children – so he was survived only by his parents and his brothers and sisters. I think its important for someone in the family to be responsible for carrying on his memory.