Yesterday the world learned about Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes' second daughter, Amada Lee, born on April 29th.
As you may recall there was not even a whisper about this, say, three months ago. It first hit Lainey's radar about two months earlier and she gave you the hints – click here and here for refreshers. Then, mid-April, there was a single picture of Eva Mendes using her bag to shield what we can reasonably assume was an almost-term pregnancy, and immediately made me wonder if there was an endorsement deal to be made when that bag inevitably becomes known as ‘the Privacy tote’.
So then they had their second child, and her name is Amada Lee. This is interesting because, of course, their first daughter is named Esmeralda Amada. So...they love the name so much they used it twice? Eva said after their first daughter was born that Amada was for her grandmother, so maybe something happened between the birth of the two girls that made it more significant to them. Except we’ll never know, because they’re so private! They are incredibly private! It might also be some sort of naming tradition I don’t know about. For example, there are Middle Eastern traditions where your father’s first name becomes your last name…maybe passing a name between siblings is a similar tradition…Eva and her mother are both Eva, for what it’s worth.
For me, ‘Lee’ is the outlier here…so spare and unisex and less decorated than the other names in the family. But hey, maybe they have a Harper Lee affection or a Curtis Sittenfeld one or having a modern name will separate Amada from Esmeralda. I don’t know, but I know they will make me more interested than I already am by not immediately taking out a full two pages in People to tell me about it. They’re good that way. Call it confirmation bias or whatever, but I already liked them and the low-key way they’ve done this –for the second time—makes me like them that much more.
Attached - Ryan and Eva out in LA with their daughter Esmeralda on Mother's Day.
