Names

I shall call him squishy and he shall be mine and he shall be my squishy.


  Everyone quotes Shakespeare when they're talking about names.  I'm more of a Finding Nemo kind of guy.

  Rachel and I had a name all picked out for a girl.  We were 95% certain what we would name her, and while we thought about boys' names, nothing sounded quite right.  We figured we had a 50% chance this wouldn't be a problem.  It now is.  Maybe not a problem, so much, as it is a dilemma.  What shall we name this beautiful baby boy?

  We have a few general guidelines that we've discussed.  (Well, I've discussed them with myself.  Some of them I've talked about with Rachel.  I'm pretty sure she'd agree on all of them.  Guess I'll find out when she reads this.  That makes it sound like we have bigger communication problems in our marriage, but we don't.  Not that I know of, or not that she's told me about.  But I digress...)

  1)  It has to be a name easy to pronounce.  Since Rachel's mom is a teacher, we understand the difficulty of having a kid correct the teacher (and many others) on how to say his name.

  2)  It has to be fairly easy to spell.  It's frustrating to always be correcting people whenever they write your name.  People spell my name wrong about 30% of the time, and it gets old correcting them.  We don't want to give them a name that requires correcting 90% of the time.

  3)  It doesn't have to be Biblical.  I have gone back and forth on this one, and I felt pretty guilty about it for a while.  (Ah, guilt, you old friend.  What would I do without you?)  Then I realized that none of the names in the Bible were Biblical until the people lived in such a way as to get them included in the Bible.  On the 8th day, God did not create a list of approved names.  That said, we're probably not going to name the kid Judas.

  4)  It can't be easily made fun of by a middle schooler.  Middle school is difficult enough.

  5)  It can't remind me of a truly awful movie.  (So we probably have to leave off Indiana.  Thanks, George Lucas, for ruining that one.)

  6)  It shouldn't rhyme with something offensive.  See rule #4.

  7)  The secretary at church said it should flow well, so when you shout at the child for playing in traffic or trying to tie the cats' tails together it won't be awkward.

  That's about it.  There are a lot of names that fit within these guidelines, so we have a number of names to choose from.  For a while, I thought that Santa fit all these guidelines.  It's easy to spell, and everyone has heard of it.  Then I realized how tough it would be for the kid when everyone was running around in 5th grade saying they don't believe in Santa.  (If you still believe in Santa, pretend you never read this paragraph.  And you should probably stop using the internet--it's only going to get worse.)

  We've got some time to work on it and choose something, but I'd like to at least have some options that sound good.  I don't think we'll be keeping it a secret, but I'll have to ask Rachel about that.  Perhaps we will be...