Summer is a very long-held favorite, chosen long ago, not only simply for its own charms (which in my mind are considerable), but also specifically to match both our surname (on my profile) and my other girls' names (as far as being an S name, basically, which, yes,
Soraya would also do). Among other factors, one of the things I like about
Summer is that it does not end in A, as over half of female names do. I only wanted to have one name among my daughters that starts with S and ends in A; that one name turned out to be
Sophia. (
Sophia's second mn is
Seraphina, yes, but we don't call her by it; I am referring specifically to those names by which we call the girls.)
If
Gideon had been a girl she would have been
Summer Siena (for St.
Catherine of
Siena, who not only is my personal patroness but also a patroness of nurses in general, and who shares my mother's name).
Since that time, seeing several little
Siena /
Sienna / Cianna / etc's get born around me, I decided against it, and turned instead to Nightingale, for
Florence, the Lady with the Lamp.
Soraya is very pretty, and I do like it very much; but I prefer an admittedly apostate spelling, Saraia, as a blending, or crossbreed, as it were, between
Soraya and
Sarai.
:-)