What's in a name?

On this momentous evening, the Mrs. and I spent the majority of our evening watching President Obama win his re-election, but once that was all said and done, we moved on to an even more important (at least, to us) activity: Picking the name of our child.

Now, since it's so early, we obviously haven't the first inclination of whether we'll be having a boy or a girl.  If you're to believe the Chinese Gender Predictometer, as well as a number of old wives tales, we're to be blessed with a bouncing baby girl.  However, since I'm of the firm belief that these devices are 100% hokum, we've picked a name for both.

We're keeping our names under close guard, as to avoid any tomfoolery or name snatching from taking place by the people we know, and the people we don't.

However, I will say we had a blast picking our names.  We've toyed with baby names since long before we were blessed, but never actually decided on anything concrete.  My wife's grandmother was kind enough to send us an enormous book of over 100,000 baby names, and we got a kick out of flipping through the pages.  Many names in this book, I never realized existed, and many of them are names that you would never expect to be used as names.

As it is, prior to receiving this book, we had picked out a handful of names for either gender, but picked out a select few as we were flipping through the pages.  We lined out a list of around 10 names for a boy, and 10 names for a girl (girl names are tough, in case you've never been a dude and tried to think about girl names).

From there, we went through each list.  First we paired each name with our last name, and said them out loud a bunch of times, to figure out what fit, and what didn't fit.  Once we had narrowed down the list a bit, then we picked middle names (which is even more difficult than picking a first name, in my opinion).  Once we'd picked out middle names, we said all three together, and then crossed off which of those didn't fit.

This process actually worked quite well, better than I expected.  It allowed us to narrow down the list to exactly one name for each gender.  And as I said earlier, we plan on keeping them under lock and key (literally), until the day our child is born.  Until then, our child will continue to be lovingly referred to simply as "Bean."  (For those who are just joining us, we started calling our kid "Bean" the day we had our first ultra sound, as that's exactly what it looked like).

I feel accomplished tonight.  I'm pretty sure the Mrs. does, as well, but she's passed out on the couch currently, so I'm unable to verify.


So tonight marked a milestone for not just America, but for us well.

Until next time!

-Mr. J