Pregnancy Pages: What's In A Name?

If I am this neurotic about picking out baby gear, can you imagine how insane I am about naming this child? This has been another adventure for Patrick and I.

Picking the name that this person will have to go through their whole life with and hoping that we come up with something perfect.  Not too soft, not too hard but something that will sound strong and smart—without ever meeting them—no pressure.    

We are not “traditional name” kind of people… despite the fact that we both have pretty normal names. Patrick is named after about ninety people in his family who were/are named Patrick. His maternal grandfather and his godfather are the two most important that I know of. Then again, I seem to meet a new cousin every year from Patrick’s side (despite the fact that we’ve been together for almost a decade) so I’m honestly not totally sure on those facts.

I am named after Kristin who shot JR on the old television show, Dallas.  It’s nice to only have to aspire to be better than a murderer. I will let you decide who comes from the wackier family. When I look through my baby book and old things from when I was born it looks like there was some debate on how to spell my name. By debate I mean that my mother forgot to inform my father that it’s Kristin with an I-N, so some documents do have Kristen. Again, drawn your own conclusions.

The thing that we learned very quickly was to keep our name choices to ourselves. Nothing good comes from answering that question—be it for strangers or our close family. Everyone had a bad experience with a little boy in the first grade or their first girlfriend or the teacher in high school who was a witch…. And they want you to know that if you name your baby that same name your child too will inflict those experiences on everyone that they meet. 

We have a list of names that we like and we hope that one will work out for our little addition on his or her birthday. One of them is a color (and no, not Blue Ivy), one of them is now also a celebrity’s baby’s name (but wasn’t when we picked it), and one is a unisex name that is traditionally a boy’s name but we like it for a girl. You can probably see why we’re keeping things under wraps, but I assure you that they are all adorable and appropriate for this person to grow into an adult as well. 

Tell me your baby naming stories—what names did you pick and how? Did you end up changing the baby’s name once you met him or her?  How did your parents pick your name?  And of course—give me some ideas!