Naming Babies

After a lot of back and forth on my part, we have officially scheduled an induction for Friday. So, the baby will be here if not sooner, then on Friday. I hope.

Of course, we've been thinking a lot about names and trying to decide how and what to name our baby. I've been thinking back on MJ and T and how we picked their names.



With MJ, we went to the hospital with three names. I can't remember much of the process that got us to that point. I think we just looked through lots of baby name lists and came up with some that we liked. AJ came up with a naming algorithm. If she seemed impish (as manifest by red hair), then she would be Mallory. If she seemed cultured and refined (I'm not sure how we would tell that), she would be Elizabeth. If she seemed independent and opinionated, she would be Maren. As it turned out, from the moment she was born until at least 90 minutes later, MJ cried a so loudly, so intensely, and so vigorously that we went with Maren. She was bright red.

Maren is a Danish name and sounds great with our surname. In fact, when we went back and looked at AJ's pedigree charts, we found a lot of Marens there. In New Jersey and New York, her name was virtually unheard of, but here in Minnesota, we've run into a lot more Marens. Her middle name is Julia, a tribute to my mom's family line. Julia is my grandma's mother. I think Maren Julia has a great lilt to it. I love the way her name rolls off the tongue.

With T, it was so much harder. Before his birth, we had never really settled on names that we liked a lot. I wanted something unusual, but not totally off the charts as far as weird. I was obsessed with checking the Social Security name popularity web site. I didn't want any boy names in the top 50 and would regularly veto any that came up that were too popular. I was also worried about how his name would go with MJ's. We had a fluctuating list, but Caleb, Toby, and Zane regularly surfaced to the top. We also had Sawyer (before Lost was on tv), Hayden, and a bunch of others that came and went. His middle name was predetermined: Anthony, after AJ's dad. I didn't love any of the names we had thought about.

After he was born, we still were thinking about what to name him. He was born at 9:45 in the morning, and we spent that day looking through the phone book to see what other names we could find--I remember browsing through the lawyer section of the yellow pages to see if there were last names we could use as first names. AJ went down to the bulletin board where all the babies who had been delivered in the hospital were listed. Nothing struck us. The nurses kept hounding us about his name: on each bassinet, they had placed the baby's name, with each letter on a baby block. They wanted to put something up for him. Finally, the morning after he was born, she asked us if there was something we wanted to try out on his bassinet, to see if we liked it. We gave in and said Toby. Although we had thought to call him Toby, I didn't want to give him that name. I didn't like Tobias. Or Tobiah. So, we came up with Tobin. But, Tobin Anthony doesn't sound great. In the end, I finally just gave in and said yes to Toby and signed my name on his birth certificate.

I didn't really call him Toby for the first month of his life: he was "the baby." Then, it started to stick and now I think it's a perfect name for him--in contrast to MJ, T was so quiet and mellow when he was first born, I worried that something was wrong with him. I just put a new ringtone on my phone from a song that has this fun line: "I've never met a Toby that I didn't like." When we sent out an email about his birth, one of my favorite comments was, "President Bartlett would be so proud." This, from fellow West Wing fans in Princeton. Although we didn't choose his name because of the character Toby Ziegler on West Wing, it certainly didn't dissuade us from giving him that name.

With this baby, we have had a fairly consistent list of top names for about the last two months. The top tier is Henry, Will (from William), and Zane. The second tier, which doesn't really exist anymore, was Taggert, Quinn, and Bram (from Abraham). I really have liked Eli, but AJ doesn't, while he was strongly pushing Dane for a while. I said no.

As it's gotten closer, I've started to rethink our list. William has been in the top 10 most popular baby boy names for the last 15 years at least. Henry has been rising in popularity, and AJ wants to call him Hank if we name him Henry. I'm not a fan.

And, then we have to deal with the middle name of Giacomo--it won't go with our last name and it won't go with any name we pick for his first name. AJ says Giacomo will be a name he'll never tell his friends about.

Just recently, AJ has fixated on the name Zeke. But, Ezekiel Giacomo? In AJ's words, "Why don't we just give the kid a swirly the day he's born?"

So, right now, this is what's on my list: Will, Henry, and Zane. They're still there. And then there's Lars, Taggert, Eli, Nicholas, Blaise, and Leo. I'm not sure what else is on AJ's list now, but he says Zeke is his dark horse candidate.

Hopefully, we will have come to an agreement this weekend.