Dear Selah,
Selah Elizabeth Cross
Someday I hope you’ll read this. I’m sure we’ll have told you most of the stories about your early days, even those before you were born, so many times you will be tired of hearing them. Just in case I wanted to let you know from long before you were born, you were so loved by your mommy and me.
I hope you like your name…we put a lot of thought into choosing it. Your mother wanted a far different name, but that’s because she didn’t grow up in a place where people named cows and didn’t realize it would have been inappropriate. Don’t tell her I told you that.
We went back and forth on names. We knew we wanted something from the Bible and something that had a good meaning. I didn’t want you looking up your name someday and being disappointed. I remember the night we were going through names and I was just reading through a list of names and each of us said ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or just remained indifferent. Then I read “Selah,” and we both paused. A quite appropriate pause because the word means ‘to pause and reflect.’ It was the first name that we both agreed on that wasn’t too popular and sounded as beautiful as we knew you were going to be.
I hope no one is giving you a hard time about how to pronounce the name. We did our research before settling on pronouncing Selah as, SAY-luh. We actually found a website that had native speakers, (your name is Hebrew) and the pronunciation there was very close to SAY-luh, the only different is the accent. We weren’t going to make you go around having to change your accent every time you said your name, so we went with the Americanized version of the pronunciation. I hope you are the only Selah in your class.
As I write this, you are still weeks away from arrival, or you are supposed to be weeks away, and we are still getting ready for your appearance. The room is painted and the crib is put together. I hope you like your ceiling…it took me forever to refinish it. Just know that everything we do is because we love you.
See you soon.
Love,
Daddy
