What's In A Name?

No- we still don't have one. And it makes me feel guilty. Without one, the baby seems somehow subhuman, but it's simply too big a decision. I think I've shorted out thinking it over so much. While I always anticipated the name decision as being an exciting part of expecting a baby, it's turned out to be one of the worst. I hate it- which could be why we're at a standstill...and have been for, oh, six months or so. Girl names would not so much trouble...or maybe we only think that because we have to come up with a boy name...(the grass is always greener, right?). I can't imagine there's a parent out there who has done more name research than I have. I've always been interested in names- and I'd done plenty of name-searching in the past for characters in my writing, but this is something entirely different...and far more important. I've read for hours (and I don't exaggerate) about name trends (past, present, and future), name meanings and origins. I know the most popular names for the past 100 years. I've yet to have anyone suggest a name I haven't already seen somewhere in all my reading. The Social Security Administration has been an excelllent resource. It has beaucoups of name information and there is even a feature on their website where you can type in any name and find out whether it has ever been one of the top 1000 names (since 1880, I think). I read in an article yesterday that said the vast majority of new parents choose their kids' names off a list of the same 500 names. Of course, this shouldn't surprise me, since most of them come off the same list of 10. I just can't do that to our son. Be that uncreative; put that little thought into the moniker he has to live with his entire life. My baby (who will, let's not forget, one day also be a toddler and a little boy and a teenager and a young man, and an old man...God willing...and throughout those stages will still have the same name we give him the day he is born) is going to be special. For the life of me I cannot fathom how parents look at their new baby, think he is the most special baby ever born, and then give him the same name half the other people in the maternity ward that day gave their "most special" new baby. I won't sentence Soda to a life as one of a million. I don't want him to be forever Jacob A. or Aiden A...just one in a sea of others people can only remember from one another by their last initial. I don't want to be too trendy, I don't want to be too weird, I don't want people to mispronounce his name, spell it wrong, tease him about it, shorten it to a stupid nickname. I don't want him to sound perpetually four or forty or eighty-two. I don't want him to have bad initials; I want his name to mean something to us and to him. I don't want to look back five or fifteen years from now and wish I'd named him something else. While I can't bring myself to name him something off the top ten list (or the top 1000 for that matter), I don't intend to do something too out there either (like give him a trendy or common name and spell it in some ridiculous way- i.e. Aydin or Jaycub) or name him something too hippie like Banjo or Cedar. (Though I have to say I like those last two better than most popular names.) So what's a name-conscious mommy to do? I can find something wrong with every name brought to the table...and it's becoming depressing. As a last ditch effort, I sat at Books-A-Million yesterday with a decaf coffee pouring over baby name books (to no real avail). My favorite, though, was one called A is for Atticus which had some great literary baby names...just fyi, if you're looking. It isn't that there aren't names I like...it's that there isn't a perfect name. I'm convinced we'll have to settle...and that makes me sad. And frustrated more than anything. Shakespeare wrote, "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet," but would an Aiden or a Jacob or a Josh and a Randi be the same people they are by any other name?

Need some name resources? Start here:

babynamewizard.com/namevoyager
ssa.gov/OACT/babynames