Whats in a name?

Thankfully we had a pretty slow day today.  The newsworthy events were:
1) We decided to start doing "Gavage Feedings" with Scarlett again.  They put the food in a syringe on the end of her feeding tube and let gravity control the flow.  This is the standard way they feed babies this young (gestationally) but she was struggling with keeping her oxygen saturation towards the end of her feedings.  For the past couple weeks her syringe was on a pump to control the flow.  She started at 1 hour, then 45 minutes, then 30.  Today she moved back to gavage and did well!
2) I swaddle held Grayson for the first time!

3) Scarlett was down to 21% oxygen for some time today!  That is the percentage of oxygen in the air we breathe.  I believe the twins were at or around 21% their first weekend which many NICU nurses refer to as the "Honeymoon" because babies can act reasonably healthy before the act of surviving starts wearing them down.  Our babies fell in that category so 44 days later we are are ecstatic to be at 21% even if it is only for a brief period of time.

So on a slow news day, we have to pull out our B roll.  Trish and I wanted to share how we came up with the names.  For some of you, it may be pretty obvious, but we wanted to add some commentary.  Trish and I graduated from The Ohio State University.  More importantly, we met there.  Trish's parents were high school sweethearts and went to OSU together, and raised her to live, breathe, eat and sleep the Buckeyes.  I grew up a military brat, moving around a lot, but once I arrived in Columbus I knew I found a home.

Trish and I ended up sharing a group of friends.  Her sophomore year (I was deployed that year) she roomed with one of my good friends.  When I came home, I kept hearing about her.  A lot of:

Random friend: "Remember when we all went to so-and-so's party and such and such happened?"
Me: "No, was that last year?"
Friend: "I don't remember.  I thought it was you, me, Trish, and so-and-so."

So after a couple months of that, I decided I needed to meet her.  1 Halloween party later, I was crazy about her and knew I could convince her to like me too ;-)

So fast forward past our graduation, wedding, etc until about 6 or 7 years ago.  I came home from work excited to share an idea with Trish.  I think she was relieved to learn it was not an idea for a product, service, or some other business that was going to make you rich!  (I get to spend a lot of time in my car traveling to client meetings and can't help but think of many things that I am sure would make me a millionaire if I ever had a chance to go on Shark Tank!)

So I asked her, if we ever have Boy/Girl twins, can we name them Scarlett and Grayson?  Trish said she liked those names individually.  At the time, I am sure she was thinking "What are the odds???"  We weren't actually naming them Scarlet and Gray, right?  (She had shot down Woodrow, Hayes, Tressel, Urban, Ezekiel, Elliot, Braxton, etc.)

Fast forward again until this fall.  We find out we are pregnant (yay!) with twins (rut roh!) and then learn we are having one of each (yippee!)!  We have the conversation, are we going to be THOSE people?  I say yes!  Trish says "Let's keep our minds open."  However we only had 6 weeks from the time we learned the sexes until Trish was admitted to the hospital.  Do you know hard it is to decide on 2 names that we both like, that go well together, for a boy and a girl?  We knew we didn't want names that rhymed or sounded too similar (such as Hayden and Hadley), so we had alternate boy names and alternate girl names but nothing that we could settle on for both.  So once they were born, it became the moment of truth, especially a couple days later when filling out the paperwork to be discharged from the hospital.  So one of my theories is they heard some of the names we were contemplating, and decided they needed to get out here before we changed the names they wanted ;-)

 Grayson when we left

 Scarlett when we left