Baby Name Rank and File

For the past four years, I’ve been unnaturally excited about the Social Security Administration’s release of its most popular baby names list. Before having kids, the most thought I gave to the popularity of a name was during my freshman year of college, when it seemed like every other girl in each of my classes was also named Amy, which makes sense now that I know it ranked at No. 2 in the year I was born.

I found out about this annual list in 2007 when I became pregnant with my first child and my husband and I began the quest to name her. We landed on Lucy pretty quickly, even though we tossed around several other names just to try them on for size. Although we kept the name to ourselves, I reserved the right to change my mind after she was born. For some reason, to me, Lucy belonged on a fair-haired baby and if she had been born with a mop of dark hair, I might have lobbied for a different name altogether.  Lucy was born with a little fuzz of yellow hair in January 2008, when her name clocked in at number 112.

Two years and a few months later, it was much harder coming up with a name for our son. It’s hard to get creative with boy names somehow, and again we landed on another classic name: Isaac. Just in time for his first birthday, we now know that many other parents were thinking the same thing in 2010 – his name landed at number 39 on the list.

My main personal criteria for naming the kids included that their names had to be instantly recognizable in a way that there was only one way to pronounce them. We also didn’t want to pick names that were so popular that our kids would automatically be known by a combination of their first name and the first letter of our last name because there were several other kids by that name in their classes at school. Now it seems like maybe there will be many Lucys and Isaacs out there besides our own, but I’m hoping they’ll stand out on their own merits, regardless of their names.

This week, the Social Security Administration will break down the list according to state. So we’ll have a better idea of whether my children will be better known as “Lucy L.” and “Isaac L.” as they grow up in Maryland.