The history of Amy Teegan's name:

Our daughter, Amy (Teegan) has new business cards for the photography business that she's building in portraits and weddings, etc.. Here's the front & back of the cards (mounted on an aqua background because my scanner kept cropping the edges for some reason). Aren't they cool? And I love the photo of Avalon that Amy took!

Take a look at her site.

Also, there seems to be some confusion about how she got the name, Teegan, so I'll fill in the gaps on her name. Later I'll share a few other fun stories about Amy & her name, as well. (Amy, don't let me forget.)

When Terry and I first got married, we started talking about baby names, as young couples often do. We realized that there weren't a lot of names that we both liked and it took us quite a while to agree on even one name for a girl and one for a boy. The names that we finally agreed on several years before we had any kids were Brian for a boy and Amy for a girl. I actually don't even remember if we had middle names chosen yet. I had a few different criteria for our kid's names:

• I wanted a name that sounded good with Hann (it's English, not German and sounds like "hand" without the "d", not Hawn or Hahn like most people say it.)
• My theory is that a one syllable last name should have a two or three syllable first name...just sounds better to me for some reason.
  
• And because we knew they would constantly be correcting people when their last name was misspelled or mis-pronounced we wanted a first name that was fairly straight forward and hard to misspell or mis-pronounce.
• We also wanted names that were not being overused at the time. Names go through cycles, and since I grew up with a ton of Nancy's in my classes, I wanted something that wasn't attached to every 3rd child in the world. We didn't want their names to be boring, though.
  

So those were the ground rules for how we picked their names. Now a middle name is different, because most people seldom use or see it and it can go in so many different directions. We decided early on not to name our kids AFTER any extended family because we have just too many relatives and didn't want to choose one and leave the others out. Actually we really thought Amy was going to be a boy, and I hated the idea of calling that mysterious child inside my round belly "It", so most of the time we called her "Brian". (maybe that's why she's not such a girly girl - doesn't matter, we love her just the way she is.)

So as the pregnancy weeks went on, we didn't know the sex of the baby, and we hadn't yet decided on a middle name for our potential little girl, Amy. We looked at baby name books all over the place and scanned every other source we could think of, but nothing really clicked. Finally just a few months before the baby was to be born, we were at the house of our friends, Randy & Linda. Linda was also pregnant and let me borrow her "Unusual Baby Names" book. Now it is true that they had a cat, named Teegan at the time and we really liked that name. But we didn't actually name her after the cat.

When we heard the name Teegan, and found out that it was Welsh for "beautiful" and that it fit all our other criteria, we fell in love with it. But because it was close to the delivery date and we didn't have a long time to ponder the idea of using it as a first name, we decided to use it for her middle name, in case she didn't really like it later on, she wouldn't be stuck with it so prominently. After she was born and when I was pregnant for the second time, we actually thought about using Teegan as a first name if we had a girl because we loved it so much. It would have been a little strange, to have two kids with the name Teegan (one first, one middle) but who cares. Turns out we had our son, Kevin instead so we didn't have to make that decision. (By that time everyone was choosing Brian so we gave that one up.)

So we're very happy with the name Teegan. Her uncle still calls her that, and Amy, if you want me to start calling you Teegan, I'd be happy to do that. I love the name and I'm glad you do too! Good news for you that you don't have to deal with the "Hann" corrections any more...

And here's a photo of our sweet little Amy Teegan in her rosebud dress, on her first day home from the hospital! Isn't she beautiful...just like her name? Note that there's lots of yellow in the accessories, since we didn't know if we were having a boy or a girl.