The stork has arrived!

ALYSSA MARIE DANIAL

I must apologize for the tardiness of my postings. As most of you know, our daughter arrived May 27, 2009 so things have been hectic around here to say the least.

Alyssa Marie Danial was born last Wednesday at 10:27am and weighed 7 pounds, 4 ounces. She was 20.5 inches long and is a beautiful, healthy, and sleepy baby. I will post more details about her arrival as well as tons of pictures very soon, but I also wanted to explain why we chose the name we did for our little bundle of joy.

My mom used to always tell me that custom dictated that the middle name of a person should be a saint's name. That is why my middle name is Anne. Since Alyssa was born in May, the month of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we decided that her middle name should reflect Mary's name. Plus, we both had relatives with the name Marie and liked how the name sounded with Alyssa.

Her first name took us longer to decide upon. We thought about Arabic names, but could not find one that we both liked. We really wanted to name her after the city of Alexandria where Shereif loved to go as a child, but we thought the name was too long. After looking at shortened versions of the name, we realized that we wanted a name that no one in our family already possessed. Since I have about a million relatives (no joke), this was a tremendous feat. Shereif fell in love with the name, and I love that he loved Alyssa from the moment he saw her in the first ultrasound. She was Daddy's girl before she even arrived, and he loves on her so much now. Alyssa means nobility and is also the name of a flower. We think this fits her perfectly since her grandparents have called her princess since they first found out about her. She has become our little princess, and we cannot wait to watch her grow into a beatiful queen.