Baby Names

I wrote a post on my moms' group message board today about baby names and I wanted to capture this information somewhere for posterity's sake since this is my baby journal this time around.

This is how we chose Carter's name...

We knew if we had a boy that his middle name would be Glenn after my husband since in his family, the father's name is always the first son's middle name. (If it had been a girl, her middle name would have been Jean after my family. It's my middle name and also my cousin's, my mom's and my grandmother's...who we later found out made it up in high school because coming from a big family, she hadn't been given one and wanted one! Which is TOTALLY my grandmother's personality.)

We wanted his first name to be something relatively modern and not too traditional that we chose because we liked it, not because we were obligated to use it. It had to be: easy to spell and pronounce; familiar (top 100ish) but not too common (top 10); sound good with Glenn and McKay (which ruled out most one-syllable names); sound equally appropriate on a business card and as a rock star name (I got that one from Kori); preferably not a predominantly female unisex name; and I know we must have had a few others, but can't remember them at the moment!

We wanted to keep it a secret because I didn't want to hear or see any "oh, THAT's the name" reactions or hear how it was the worst name ever/the name of someone's pet/arch-enemy/etc. We weren't planning to reveal it until after he was born, but when I auditioned for Who Wants To Be A Millionaire in June (at 5 months preggo), I told them that if I made it on the show, I would reveal his name on-air. Which totally happened, believe it or not, for those of you who weren't around back then. So we ended up revealing his name to Meredith Vieira and the live studio audience (and weeks later, the rest of the world) on national television. So if anyone hated it, I didn't have to see/hear their reactions and they had some time to compose themselves and tell me how fabulous it was the next time we talked! :)

For Baby #2, we kept the same set of rules (which really irked Glenn since he tends to like popular names this go-round...I love Ethan, but as a Jennifer, I had to eliminate that one!) and I added a few more rules. No presidential names because while Carter was not an intentional canonization of Mr. Jimmy, having a Jackson, Grant or Clinton might seem intentional. And we also tried to stay away from -er names, since having a Carter and Cooper would make it sound like we were terribly productive in our house, busily making carts and barrels all day long. :)

I had my favorite that Glenn nixed, he had his favorite that I nixed, and we finally arrived at Baby #2's name last weekend. Which yes, we are tentatively keeping under wraps for all of the above reasons. But since we've already told Carter the parrot and he learned it instantly, we don't have high hopes that it will stay a secret for long. He told my mom today, and thankfully she liked it!