Naming Woes

What's in a name? For us, that's a loaded question. We are at T-21 days until the baby comes and still no name options. Naming girls? No problem, we could have a dozen. Boys are a different story. When we had Cole, we fought it out for a good nine months. He went home from the hospital with a name, but just barely. There are two main problems with choosing boys names for us: 1) I like very few baby names. 2) Floyd likes very strange baby names. This doesn't leave us with many options.

You would think, given that his name is a bit unusual for someone in our generation and that people still ask him, "no, seriously," when he introduces himself, that Floyd would be a little sensitive to strange names. You would be wrong. Now, I know everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but...here are the three names Floyd was really rooting for when we named Cole. You decide.

1) Blue. Like the color. Would have been really awesome if his middle name was Floyd, right? Blue Floyd.

2) Lester. Yes, rhymes with "molester." I'm sure he never would have been teased.

3) Danner. A brand of hiking boots. Not really what I wanted to name my son after.

He doesn't really seem to have any set criteria for names that he likes, so it's hard to predict what he will like. His only real stipulations are that they can't be preppy or trendy (which should be interpreted to mean that he knows more than 2 children with that particular name).

My criteria, on the other hand, are a little demanding. I'll admit I'm very fussy. It's hard to nail down exactly what I do and do not like in a baby name, but here are some basic guidelines.

1) I like the name to have a good meaning. No matter how much I liked the name, if it meant something like "bean grower" (Fabian), I just couldn't use it. Even worse are the names people make-up that have no meaning whatsoever. Katie means "pure" - I always liked having a name that meant something nice. I tend to be drawn toward names with some type of religious significance, but other good virtues and qualities work for me too. Also, I like family names. Annie Rose was named after my great-grandma and my mom. Floyd knows the names of about 2 of his ancestors, so he's not much help there.

2) I want people to know if the child is a boy or girl based on the name. I spent a lot of years testing preschool aged children for my job. I did not like not knowing whether the child was going to be a boy or a girl. This is even more important for a boy than a girl and is one of the big reasons I don't like one of Floyd's new favorites - Lane.

3) I do not want you to be able to guess within a ten year time frame when my child was born. When I was in 5th grade and we studied the president's, I decided to name my girls, Madison and Kennedy and my son Jackson. I had never heard of children being named any of these names. They are clearly not so unknown anymore and none remain on my list of favorites. It's not that I hate all the names on the Top Ten Baby Names Lists - I actually like lots of them, I just don't want to use a name that will be so tied to a specific time. My great-grandma was an Ethel and as odd as that name seems today, it was on the top ten list during her particular year of birth. I looked it up.

4) Spelling is hugely important to me. Maybe it's because of my years in the school spelling bee (which I hated being in, but made the sacrifice since my mom always got me a new outfit for it), but I just don't like weird spelling. Granted, some names can be spelled in several ways and one way isn't really more correct (Kelli/Kelly, Haley/Hailey, etc). This doesn't really bother me. It's when there is one generally accepted way of spelling it and parents decide to get a little too creative. I think this bothers me because of the many bizarre spellings I encountered while testing kids. Like Cheyenne spelled Shien. How would I know how to pronounce that? Poor kids never get any souvenirs with their names printed on them, not to mention that they spend their entire life correcting people!

5) The obvious one - no bad memories of other people connected with the name. This is probably true for most people and why my husband will not let me use the name Elizabeth. Not even for a middle name.

So, if you have any suggestions that fit the above criteria - both mine and Floyd's - we'd love to hear them. My mother-in-law asked this weekend if we'd narrowed the list down yet and I just laughed because we are actually still looking for names to put on the list so that we can actually have a list. While it is tempting for me to just put the decision off until after I deliver because we all know Floyd is too sweet to not let me have my choice of names at that point in time, I really want to find a name we both like. Wish us luck! We certainly need it.