Naming our daughter proved incredibly difficult. I’m a teacher, and there are some names I just can’t repeat every day for the rest of my life.

Additionally, we lost two babies at eight weeks before finally making it past the first trimester with our little girl. During those initial months, I was afraid to name her because I didn’t want to jinx her existence. For the first 25 weeks, I referred to her as “Hurl Worrell” because I barfed my way into the hospital at 14 weeks.

When it came time to name her, neither her dad nor I could figure out what on earth to call the child. I knew her middle name would be “Faith” because we had so many people praying for us on our infertility journey, and it took mountains of faith for us to try again after such painful losses. We both knew she couldn’t go through life saddled with a name like “Hurl Faith” but I had crossed out about half the names in the baby name book already. I’d said those names enough over my past decade in education.

Advice flew around us like baby shower confetti.

“Give her a strong/simple/old-fashioned/hipster/crunchy name,” folks told us.

Some people suggested we stand on the back deck and scream the name over the yard to see how it sounded. Others, like my maternal fetal specialist, said the name had to have two syllables. No more, no less.

Completely befuddled, we did what we usually do when we face a conundrum. I bought another book, and my husband took a nap. I was reading aloud names from the new volume while my husband snoozed away as though we didn’t have anything important going on like a baby without a name.

By the time I got to "Lilac" and nearly threw the book across the room in frustration, my husband sat up.

“Kindred!” he cried. “Her name is `Kindred.’”

At that moment, our daughter burst into my mind’s eye with blond curls, cobalt eyes and declared, “I’m Kindred.”

We didn’t even have to scream it off the back deck. With two syllables and so much grace and prayer, we put “Kindred Faith” on her birth certificate a few months later.

At nine years old, our little kindred spirit is always there with a smile or a hug to brighten someone’s day. We’ve never quite decided if her name is crunchy, hipster, hippie, or strong; we also know the child will never find her name on a souvenir pencil case. What we do know is that her name fits. Her father and I had faith, trusted the dream, and it looks like we chose well.