The Naming

Bradley and I are really, really slow at choosing names for our children.  (Not as slow as some, like the mother and baby I visited a week after he was born.  "What is his name?"  "Oh, we haven't chosen yet.")  But my brothers and sisters tend to pick out names as soon as the sex of the baby is known, and we spent the entire last half of the pregnancy talking about baby B. or baby K. or whatever.

Not in my little family.  From the beginning, with Zee, we decided that we wouldn't tell anyone our baby's name until AFTER he was named.  This way, nobody can mock the name, because the baby is already named.  (It works, too.  Well, nobody can mock the name to our faces, which is all that matters.)

Instead, we gave our babies womb names.  Zee was Kronk (after the lovably stupid bad/good guy in The Emperor's New Groove); Em was Yzma (after the marvelously over-the-top bad lady in the same Disney movie); Gee was Dulé (after the actor Dulé Hill, from the West Wing and more recently Psych); and Hebs was Baby Awesome (after Captain Awesome from Chuck).  And of course Ralphette, who is named after the fact that Bradley wants to name a baby Ralph and Keryn won't let him.

Bradley came into the marriage with some fairly strict criteria for baby names.  They have to be unusual (nothing in the top 200 most popular baby names--the Baby Name Wizard is a really fun site to play with!), pronounceable (as my name is not), and spellable (as my name is not).  That meant no fiddling with the spelling to make it unique, which wiped out most of my adolescent choices.  (Which is okay.  Some of them...shiver.)  We didn't mean to embark on a "theme", but after we named our first three, we feel sort of obliged to keep it going.  (Don't worry, they don't all start with J or H or M or something like that.  Not that kind of theme.)

Oh!  And we wanted their names to mean something--to be named after someone great and good, or some other kind of meaning.


We didn't settle on Zee's name until about three hours before he was born.  We took the baby name book into the hospital with us, and spent some of the time between blissful epidural and actual birth deciding on his name.

Em's name took us the longest.  She was born really really fast (45 minutes after we arrived at the hospital), and we weren't expecting her for a few more days.  She was 12-18 hours old before she actually got named.

Gee's name was picked out seven days before his arrival.  For logical (although somewhat grim) reasons, I wanted to know what his name was going to be before I went into labor.  If he needed an emergency blessing or something, right after birth, he needed a name, by golly.  So he is the baby with the most lead time on his name.

Hebs was named about three hours after he was born.  We had two names, we liked both of them a lot, and finally Bradley had me choose the one I liked best.

Ralphette?  I have some ideas, but it's hard to try to decide on a girl's name when you are more than half convinced that it is a boy.  It's going to be a fun couple of months.  (This is why we have to know if it is a girl or a boy.  Otherwise, our children would be nameless for four to six months after birth!)

Whatever it is, you can be sure that we won't tell you beforehand.  (Or technically, afterward, either, since we are all about the child-anonymity on this blog.  Sorry.)