Leni's Origin

I think deciding on Leni's name was one of the hardest things ever! At the hospital, we had to fill out a registration of her birth before we were allowed to leave and so had to decide on a name before we could get out of there! Finally, our discharge nurse helped us decide between two names literally minutes before leaving the hospital.

But to go back a few steps...

Back even when I was pregnant with Gemma, Jesse and I fiddled around with the idea of somehow combining our moms' names - Ellen and In Sook. With Gemma, we thought about giving her the middle name "Ellin" (to be pronounced like "Ellen"), but we decided to give her a Korean name for a middle name instead. 

With Leni, we went through lists and lists of names. When we thought we had decided on one, we soon found ourselves not crazy about the name just a few short weeks after. I was determined to rhyme the girls' Korean names (it's a very common thing to do in Korea - tacky here, not tacky there - in fact, it represents a sense of "siblinghood"). Ari was a name we loved from since before Gemma was born and so we knew that would be the middle name. 

Back to the first name - We once again played around with combining our moms' names and came up with: Ellin (again) and Elin (pronounced Ee-Lin, like Tiger Woods' ex-wife). Not crazy about either, it was by coincidence that Leni came about. It takes the first two letters of our moms' names spelled backwards (LE from Ellen and NI from In Sook) and seemed like a good fit. 

It took a bit of convincing for Jesse, but obviously he eventually came around. It also worked out perfectly in that it's easy for my mom and the rest of my family to pronounce and has a nice meaning of "light". Ari means beautiful, so in a way, Leni's name means "beautiful light". 

and that is how Leni became Leni.