You might remember me worrying some time ago that our first-choice girl name was getting too popular. In the end, we decided not to use it, but it was still in the running even a few hours after the baby was born. With all of our other kids we’ve had a firm pick going into the delivery, but this time last week we still hadn’t settled for sure on a girl name. We’d narrowed it down to two, Idun Agda and Yrsa Elinor, but had decided to wait until we saw the baby to make a final choice. Though I was the driving force behind Yrsa, I was a little sad to lose Idun because it’s a lovely name (pronounced sort of like “EE-dune,” with a softer “n” sound than English generally has), but I was very relieved we’d gone the way we did when I opened yesterday’s newspaper to the baby announcements and saw yet another Idun among the new arrivals.

We ended up going with Yrsa for a couple of reasons. First, obviously, we both like the sound of it, though I’d been a little concerned earlier that it didn’t work well with our last name (in Swedish, “tj” sounds almost the same as the English “sh”). Second, its Old Norse meaning — “giddy one” or “wild one” — captured our imaginations (and illustrates our effort to see the spiritedness our girls tend to in a more positive light!). We did hit a bit of a snag when it came to the middle name, because it turned out Olof had taken something of a shine to Agda and didn’t want to give it up. Agda had originally been my second-choice name until I was convinced by Olof and another Swede of my acquaintance that from a pop culture standpoint it was too closely tied to a moderately ribald little song called Hönan Agda (“Agda the Hen”) to be used as a first name. I was surprised, then, when Olof expressed an attachment to it, but since I hadn’t stopped loving it, I was more than willing to consider keeping it.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t make it sound right in combination with Yrsa, so we went to sleep still undecided about a first name. In the wee hours of the morning it came to me that we could add Agda as a second middle name for Yrsa and avoid the tongue-twister effect of having the two names next to each other. It’s very common in Sweden for kids to have more than one middle name, and in fact, Brynja has two and our boy name included two, so the idea wasn’t totally out of left field. When Olof woke up in the morning I made the case for Yrsa Elinor Agda, and he liked it, too, especially after we joked that a kid who’d taken as long a time coming as this one had deserved a long name to reflect the drawn-out nature of her arrival. When she’s old enough to complain about Agda, he said, we’ll just tell her she has only herself to blame. There’s truth there, too … if she’d come in a more timely fashion we wouldn’t have had all those long weeks and days and hours to fiddle around with the possibilities, and she may well have been one more Idun in what looks to be a swelling sea.