Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Naming a baby human...

When I was pregnant with Seth, we decided what his name would be when I was about as far along with him as I am now with Baby Boy #2. And it wasn't that hard. It went kinda like this:

Me: "You really like Biblical names for boys. Hey, isn't Seth a Biblical name?"
Him: "You know, I think it is."
Me: "Well, do you like that name."
Him: "You know, I think I really do."

*This is an exaggeration, but it really was mostly uncomplicated. We went through the ritual of going through some baby name books and writing down names we liked and then crossing off each others' lists, but we came back to the original pick pretty quickly.

This time has been different. Much, much harder different. See, we both have very particular criteria for what we like in a boy name. I like slightly unusual names, but nothing so crazy that he'll get raised eyebrows everywhere he goes for a lifetime. So Igor and Engelbert are out... It is also really important to me that he not be the 5th of something in his class.

David likes traditional names. We're talking Timothy, John, James, Luke. Any of the Apostles would be fine with him.

As you can imagine, we've had a lot of trouble finding a middle ground. We've done the list thing. And we've crossed at least 50 names off. We've got two, count 'em, two names that we can agree upon. Grrr.

So I thought we had one name selected. I confidently said that this was it. We agreed; I thought it was done. And then everywhere I went, it seemed like there was a little boy with that name. I heard it three times one Sunday morning in the nursery area. The little boy sitting next to me at Moe's had that name. Apparently, it's quite popular in this state. And that makes me crazy. So now I'm rethinking the whole thing. Because he will not be the 5th of something in a group. It's just a pet peeve of mine. I know a lot of you don't care about this sort of thing. But I'm having a ranting day. Indulge me.

We can't have another boy. We've got nothin' left. We'd have to resort to David's Amazing Baby Naming Plan. This involves each of us picking a letter until one of us cries "uncle." David said he'd let me go first. How kind. And that's how baby Gravlec would get his name...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure Gravlec qualifies as "nothing so crazy that he'll get raised eyebrows everywhere he goes for a lifetime."

I think David's and your naming philosophies reflect your own names. Interesting.

Ruth LaBombard said...

Google "baby name wizard voyager". It's one of my favorite things to mess around with and might prove useful in avoiding naming trends, a pet peeve of mine also. Or you could just name the baby 'google'.

Sarah said...

We never did settle on boy names. Thankfully we didn't need them, because we had 2 girls. Although my Natalie ended up with the middle name Gwynn -- cute, right? Yeah, it's after Tony Gwynn -- who used to play for the San Diego Padres. Oh well.

Thanks for the comment on my credit card post! FYI, we have a Chase Rewards card.

Anonymous said...

That's really funny! I also have a thing about wanting to pick out names that are unusual but not TOO unusual. We ended up with some beautiful girl names, but when it was time to pick out the boy names... well... it's a long story but we ended up with a Gamli'el (pronouced Gahm-lee-el) and a Shmu'el (Shmoo-el.)
Yea. I know. :)