What are you going to name the baby?

Questions, questions, questions. We've found that being visibly with child opens you up to a lot of questions, particularly from strangers. The first question we get from most people when they see I am pregnant is: When are you due? I don't mind telling people early November, but I know a lot of women who get really uncomfortable with this question from people they don't know.

The second question is: What are you having? (A baby. At first we thought it might be kittens, but we're pretty sure it's a baby at this point.) People are shocked at the idea that people would not want to know/make public the sex of their baby. We did some hunting and found some varying numbers, but it seems that 50-70% of parents do find out the sex of their baby; so we are in the minority.

The third question we get is: What are you going to name the baby? In the beginning we told people we didn't want to have to memorize more names, so we would name our baby after one of our cats: Maxwell or Mabel. We quickly stopped this when we thought of the possibility of people monogramming things with "M." Then, David decided to tell people that if it was a boy, we would name him Ebenezer-Balthazar and if it was a girl Hortence, Hory for short.

We've honestly chosen to keep our name choices to ourselves for three reasons. 1. We want it to be a surprise for friends and family. 2. We don't want to open ourselves up for comments, opinions, criticisms, etc. (Very few people feel comfortable telling you how awful your baby name is after the baby is born.) 3. While we have narrowed it down to a couple of variations, we actually don't have a written in stone name for each sex. We're waiting until we meet the baby to find out who s/he is.

And as annoyed as strangers have been to find out that we're not spilling, we're certainly hearing it from friends and family with statements like, "It must be something horrible if you're not telling anyone. Something like Willow Bark." We promise, or at least we hope, they aren't horrible. So, to put your minds at ease, we promise that our baby's name will not have any apostrophes in it, will not have a crazy or unique spelling, will not be a word spelled backward, and will not fall into any sort of popular naming trend (Aiden/Caden/Hayden/Jaden/Brayden or Riley/Kylie/Miley, etc.). While the popularity of boys' names hasn't shifted very much over the years, especially the top names (which you can find at the Social Security website: http://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/popularnames.cgi), we promise our girl choices aren't even in the top 100. To put your minds further at ease (hopefully), we are willing to share names that we like but that didn't make the cut for baby #1. (You may see them attached to future babies, though.)

Boys: Elias, Alistair, Levi, Paul
Girls: Évangéline, Milllicent, Persephone, Flora