Why we named her Teghan Margaret

NAME GAME

Mom was sure of the spelling of their new daughter’s name.

Dad, however, wasn’t. And he was in charge of sending out the email to family and friends after she was born.

“I kind of grew Teghan on him, but there was a huge debate about the spelling,” said mom Shonagh Crawford of her husband David, who works in Internet sales support. “We had a piece of paper with six different iterations and had settled on Teghan, but he thought I said Teagan. He sent an email after her birth (Feb. 17) only to send out a retraction. “He said ‘You’ve gone through your whole life with a ‘gh,’ do you want to do that to your daughter? And I said ‘Once people get it, they don’t forget.”

So Teghan Margaret it was. It was Shonagh who heard the name first — on the radio, via music by Canadian sisters Tegan and Sara — years ago.

“I thought I’d just heard the coolest name,” said the Toronto mother, adding it went well with Margaret as a middle name, a family tradition. Morgan was another candidate — “although David thought Morgan Margaret would sound goofy” — and mom really liked Aylish, which was “vetoed really quickly.”

Shonagh, a facility co-ordinator at Wellspring, a support centre for cancer patients and their families, pressed for Teghan — which means attractive in Welsh — and eventually won. She thinks her sad, tired face after a long labour helped her case.