My Name Is, My Name Is...

I've been told not to tell people what we're thinking for names because everyone has an opinion. We go through a lot of phases with the whole name issue. We had the New York themed names like Brooklyn or Holland for a girl and Hudson for a boy. The more common names like Alexis or Isabella. And the hippie names like Rain and Bodhi. Lately we've been juggling names like Jackson, Dean, Hunter for boys and Alina, Vivian for girls. One problem is that these names tend to synchronize themselves with our lives. When we come up with a name, it's almost guaranteed that we'll meet or hear of three kids with that same name.

The Social Security website for baby names has been helpful to find out what's more common now and 100 years ago. Statistics geeks will enjoy going through the Top 1000 names by decade or finding out what year their name was the most popular. Perusing this I found thousands of children with names like Unique, Baby, Princess, Mercedes, Lexus, and about 6 spellings of the name Madison Madisyn Madyson Maddison Madisen Madisson. So whatever we name our child, I'll take comfort knowing that it's not any of those.

What's the big deal with a common name? I dunno. When I was born, Ethan was ranked 321. It was cool having a name that not many people had. These days it's ranked #5, so it gets annoying when I'm in crowds at the beach and keep hearing my name being yelled to children and wanting to answer.

Since American names tend not to mean anything like in other countries -- "Hello, I am Munkás. It means River in Hungarian." -- why not just make one up? Just throw some vowels and consonants together and come up with something that has rhythm with a difficult name like Aronoff. That was kind of the genesis of Alina. Dean came about because someone once came up to me and said, "Are you Dean?" I said, "No, but I wish I was now. That's a kickass name." Vivian was the classic approach. Hunter and Jackson were the mildly pretentious ones. So we'll see what happens. But like I've said, 10 fingers and 10 toes is all I'm really concerned with at this point. Oh, and having the heart beat inside the chest. That's a good one too.