Rainbow baby has a name

Joe and I started discussing names in October, or so. (Figuring we would want to name him no matter how this works out.) I was also pretty sure this baby was a boy, and boy names are especially tough for me after working in an alternative school for a few years. Most of our kids (who had been suspended/expelled from their regular public schools) were male. So pretty much, every name of every student that we had had there (about 100+ a year) was OUT. Then another problem is that I'm just not fond of very many boy names anyway, and of course the few names that I liked, Joe usually hated. No matter how much I hoped the name “Braden” would grow on Joe, it wasn’t going to happen.

After about a month though, we managed to settle on two names, figuring that we'd wait until the baby was born and see which name fit him better. We also knew and agreed that his middle name would be "Oliver", in honor of his big sister.

(The story veers slightly off course here, but stick with it, I'm getting to his name soon!) In mid November, I had been thinking that I really wanted to get an ornament with Olivia's name on it for our Christmas tree. (Not that I'm putting a Christmas tree up this year, but next year we will, and I still wanted an ornament.)
So my mom and I ended up at Kohl's one day when they were having a big sale plus we had a bunch of coupons. Kohl's happened to have these really cute snowmen ornaments (50% off) that look like this:

With names along the base of it at the bottom, and they also happen to light up and change colors from yellow to red to green to blue.

So anyway, as soon as I saw them, I immediately started looking for an "Olivia" snowman, and quickly realized that the side of the rack only had A-M name ornaments. A "Leah" snowman happened to catch my eye, which is the name of my friend's daughter, who was stillborn a few months before we lost Olivia. My friend collects things with her daughter's name on it (as do many "baby loss mamas"), and it was so cheap I grabbed it to buy it for her, still hoping I'd find an Olivia ornament. I walked around to the other side of the display (it was not a moveable one), and when I found the spot where the "Olivia" ornaments were supposed to be, it was empty. I looked around at all of the other O names, no Olivia's, and no Olivia ornaments were to be found there.

I was getting REALLY disappointed, but I went back to the first side of the display and started to look for an Olivia ornament there again, knowing it was a long shot since the Olivia ornaments weren't even supposed to be on this side of the display. I closed my eyes and thought to myself, "Please let there be an ornament!" and seriously, I opened my eyes and just happened to see an Olivia ornament right there.

 The hanger that it was on was only a few away from "Leah", but somehow I completely missed it, and somehow I managed to immediately see it when I went back to that side.

When I saw the name hanger that it was incorrectly placed on, I almost gasped because it was one of the two names that Joe and I had managed to agree on. Out of a couple hundred of names on the display, on the wrong side of the display that the Olivia ornament was supposed to be, there it was.

I'm not always a strong believer in signs, but that was good enough for me. And when I got home and told Joe what had happened, he agreed that it should definitely be our little boy's name, if we had a boy. So we've actually known his name longer than we've known he was a boy. (We were nowhere close to pinning down girl names.)

My new mom bracelet that showed up in the mail today:

 Rainbow baby's name will be Lucas Oliver. (Somehow I managed to grab the Leah ornament but not see the Olivia ornament a few spots away on the Lucas spot until I went back, that was the only Olivia ornament on the entire display, by the way.)

I'm not sure if and/or when we'll start calling him "Luke", we probably will but that's not definite. For now, we think of him as baby Lucas.

      In all of our name search and discussions, we looked at name meanings, but never particularly paid much attention to any of them. We don't really name our kids based on meanings. Last week, after we found out he was a boy and knew his name would be Lucas, I went back to look at meanings because I didn't remember what it meant, the last time I had looked at it I didn't even know if Joe liked the name "Lucas", and I figured he probably wouldn't like it since I did, and that's how naming goes with us. But he did like it. And it turns out that Lucas means in Latin "bringer of light"...which makes it even more perfect for our rainbow baby.

(I had an Olivia bracelet, that broke in October/November. I hated not having it and knew I wanted a new one made, so I waited until we knew rainbow baby is a boy and ordered this new one with a new strand immediately after, I'm so happy to have it before Christmas.)