Aliya's name is not typical. It is beautiful and we love it and the second we heard it we knew it was the one for our daughter. We had a long list of names written out on the Whiteboard in our home but all of them were just different spellings of the word Aliya. The debate was would we spell it... A l e a h, A a l i y a h, A l e a, A l i y a h... There was a million ways in which we could have spelled this name we adored. But it all came down to this while I held a beautiful baby in my arms the nurse handed Nate a birth certificate and he wrote it down confidently and handed it back to the nurse. A l i y a is how it is spelled. Months of wondering led to a quick but confident final decision. It is Aliya's name. It is the name Nate and I love so much and that belongs to a girl that we love more than we knew could be humanly possible. It has five letters like the number of people in our family, like the number of letters in her brother's names. It is our number 5 which seems so symbolic so many times in our family and that our kids reference as if it is "our" number. It is a name that we love to hear come out of our mouth everytime she walks down the stairs and we say "good morning Aliya" or she walks through the door and we say "welcome home Aliya". We love her name to the end. We love the uniqueness of it however that means that we don't hear it very often but even more we rarely ever find it spelled like Aliya spells her name. So the other night as Aliya was doing her math homework she stumbled across her name written right there as part of one of her word problems. She was over the moon excited! After her joyous proclamation that HER name was on the paper and even spelled correctly, she got up and highlighted it and then sat down and hummed to herself as she finished the rest of the page.
