Ask any parent about choosing a baby name and you’ll get a story. Most couples end up with a short list, and almost always there’s a name that came in second.
Carrie Underwood has one of those stories, and it comes with a twist she never saw coming.
Carrie won American Idol back in 2005 and went on to become a country superstar. She’s married to Mike Fisher, a retired NHL player. On Feb 27, 2015, the couple welcomed their first child, a little boy named Isaiah.
That name wasn’t a sure thing, though. In 2015, Carrie sat down with Hoda Kotb on NBC’s TODAY and told her how the choice really went.
It came down to two names.
Isaiah won, of course. It’s a Hebrew name with Bible roots, and NBC Insider, citing Ancestry, says it means “salvation of the Lord.”
The other name went back on the shelf. Or so they thought.
About a week after Isaiah arrived, some close friends of Carrie and Mike had a baby boy of their own. These friends had no idea which names had made the couple’s short list. Carrie made that clear when she told the story.
“Some good friends of ours [whom] we hadn’t discussed our names with at all,” she said.
Then the friends introduced their newborn.
Here’s how Carrie described the moment to Hoda: “And they had their baby a week after, and they were like, ‘Meet baby Caleb!’ And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh.'”
Caleb. That was the other name on Carrie and Mike’s final two.
In her own words to Hoda, “it was a toss up between Isaiah and Caleb.”
Think about how close that was. If Carrie and Mike had gone with their other favorite, two little boys named Caleb would have been born about a week apart in the same group of friends. Birthday parties would have been confusing for years.
The friends picked the name on their own, without knowing a thing.
TODAY covered baby Isaiah’s arrival back in 2015, and this short segment takes you right back to those happy first weeks for the new parents.
TODAY’s 2015 report on Carrie’s new baby boy
Isaiah isn’t a newborn anymore. He’s 11 now, and he’s a big brother. His little brother Jacob was born in January 2019, so the Fisher house has two boys running around these days.
Carrie has shared plenty of stories about her sons over the years. This one stands out because it’s about a choice nearly every mom and dad has to make, and how one small decision could have gone the other way.
Somewhere out there, a boy named Caleb is about the same age as Isaiah. His parents chose that name all by themselves, a week after Carrie and Mike set it aside.
If you’ve got a “name we almost picked” story in your own family, you know exactly how Carrie felt when she heard “Meet baby Caleb!”