What's in a name?

When Adam and I first found out that our baby had heart problems, we looked up the patron saint of hearts. We found that St. John of God was the patron saint of heart patients. Since we thought we were having a boy at first this worked out well, but once we found out we were having a girl, we found that Joann, Joanna, and Joan are female variations of the male name John, so we wanted to work that into her name somehow, but we didn't want to use it as a first name.

One evening, when I was about 7 months along, we were discussing names, trying to come up with a first name that we both liked, and that sounded good with Joann as a middle name. Adam threw out the name Danielle among others, but it was the only one that I liked. We tried saying it a couple times "Danielle Joann," "Danielle Joanna," "Danielle Joan." We liked the sound of Danielle Joann, so we started referring to her as Danielle or Danni instead of "Baby" which we had been doing for so long, just to try it out and see if we liked it. And the name stuck!

Danielle is Hebrew meaning "God is my judge" and Joann is English meaning "God is gracious."