It’s been six days since we welcomed our daughter, Milai Ivy Duncan. It’s been the most incredible time in my life. We are absolutely in love with her and can stare at her every second of the day. There’s so much that I want to share with you guys right now, but to start off, I wanted to do a post on why we named her Milai Ivy Duncan and where it came from.
Milai
To start, you pronounce her name ME-LAI with a nice flow. Okay, so ever since I was in middle school, I had always wanted to name my daughter Mila- I thought it was short, cute, and feminine. When we got pregnant and we found out it was a girl, I was dead set on naming her “Mila”, but the more we thought about it, the more we (especially Kell) wanted to give her a unique Japanese name like me. I also noticed a lot of girls recently being named Mila and I didn’t love that, so we started exploring some Japanese names. In Japanese, “Mirai” 未来 means future, it’s not a super common girls name in Japan either and I loved it! So why did we change the “R” in Mirai to an “L”? Because in Japan, they actually pronounce the “R”s in “L”s. So my name, for example, is spelled “Sakura,” but it’s actually pronounced “Sakula” in Japanese. So, we just decided to put our own Japanese twist to the name that I’ve always loved and came up with Milai! I love it and I’m obsessed 🙂
Ivy
Kell’s full name is Arnott Kell Duncan IV. If we had a boy, we would have kept the tradition going, but I also wanted our daughter to have a piece of him + his name, so we came up with Ivy from Kell’s roman numeral four/IV. I’ve also always wanted my dream home to have ivy growing on it! hah. I love the flow of Milai Ivy and I’m just so in love with her name!
Stay tuned for more posts on bringing home our baby, our birth story, and so much more! xx
