Wednesday

What might have been: As today is Wednesday, and it is a Wednesday in October, it makes me think of Wednesday. Not the day, but Wednesday Addams, from the Addams Family. Daddy was always a big fan of the series and movies, and early on thought that this would be a great name for a daughter: Wednesday. It's a great name!

Of course, the repercussions would be tough. Imagine having that name in high school. It would almost be something to live up to, where you'd find yourself dressing up in all sorts of goth styles and saying macabre things to people. Still, it's a cool name. But I'm glad Madison is not a Wednesday.

Other names that were in the running were "Storm" and "Jubilee," both names of Marvel characters, and the name "Juniper," which was also a favorite of ours. As the adoption process was moving along, we came across the name "Juniper," which we both loved. It was from a Cartoon Network show - and we drifted in the direction of "Juniper" as a name for a few moments... but ultimately stuck with the name Madison.

As discussed before, the name Madison means "child of a warrior." But outside of a certain President, it probably wasn't thought of as much of a first name, particularly for a female. Then came the movie "Splash."

Madison is a very popular name in the United States, especially after the release of the 1984 movie Splash in which a mermaid grows legs and comes on land. She chooses the name Madison after reading it off a street sign that says Madison Avenue. The name Madison was practically non existent before 1984 until it rose to second place in 2001, just behind Emily.

Madison isn't named after the mermaid. She's named after the capital of Wisconsin. Okay, so not exactly that, but the Wisconsin thing was pretty big for us before we got married. We saw it everywhere to the point that we were thinking there was some sort of sign that we were supposed to move to Wisconsin or something. It seriously kept popping up in just about once a day - down here in Georgia - on street signs, license plates, product labels, movies and all sorts of other places. It was one of those wild coincidences that had us sort of laughing for a summer. Seriously, if an opportunity in Wisconsin arose and we had to make a huge life decision, I think we would have moved immediately because we thought there was a sign!

So anyway, a few years later, we had the name Madison floating around as a possible name choice, and Mommy says, "You know it's the capital of Wisconsin, right?"

That was just adding a little more fuel to the fire - we liked the name enough early on, and pretty much had our minds made up in 2005 or so. For those of you keeping score, that's a year before she was even born.

When we found out her Chinese name was Mei, that really sealed the deal: the name Madison Mei just rolls off the tongue, especially when you use the nick-name "Maddie Mei." We were both certain of it pretty quick, without much debate.

I mean, it sounds much better than "Wednesday Mei."

"Your work is puerile and under-dramatized. You lack any sense of structure, character and the Aristotelian unities."

- Wednesday Addams