The Baby Name Saga

My whole life I have loved unique names...really unique names. As a child I used to doodle on my pages in class with the most unusual names I could come up with. One still sticks in mind:
Katridiana Narisia. And that is what we have decided to name our girl.

Just kidding!!! LOL (though that WAS a name I created at one point, I now realize how horrendous that is!)

Later I loved the name Larissa. All of my eventual motherhood dreams included a baby named Larissa. In sixth grade, I made up the name Kella (which, incidentally, I still think is an awesome name). My friend and I decided we hated our names and were going to change them at school. One day we came wearing name tags...mine said, "hello, my name is now Kella". It stuck for a couple of days and then I decided it was too much work to change my identity and gave up.

It's an amazing thing, after years of dreaming about names as a young girl, to have the opportunity to ACTUALLY give someone a name. It's really one of the most amazing things about this whole experience so far. It's just so common for little girls to fall in love with names they want to give their baby eventually...and to actually get to the point to pick one name out of the entire world to give your precious baby, is just an incredible honor. And we get to pick two!

I could talk about baby names with B for days and days on end, as he quickly found out. B is the type of person who HATES indecision, even about fun decisions like this. He hates ongoing discussions about possibilities. It makes Christmas shopping (or any shopping) with him excrutiatingly painful because we'll find something and I will have to continue looking to make sure we have picked the perfect gift...while he thinks we had already found it 6 hours before. :) I could see that we would never come to a decision unless I implemented a more structured process so I did.

I went through the top 1000 boy and girl names from last year, copying into a document all the ones I would seriously consider for our own kids. I guess I'm pretty picky because I only had about 12 names each for the girl and boy! I LIKE lots of other names, but love a lot fewer. So here was the list I made:

Boys (the number in parentheses is the rank of popularity in 2007):

Ethan (4)
Connor (8)
Alexander (15)
Aaron (16)
Tristan (18)
Nathan (23)
Collin (38)
Luke (46)
Mason (56)
Tyler (66)
Carson (none)

Girls:
Ava (1)
Hannah (11)
Haley (15)
Ella (16)
Savannah or Savana (33)
Sara (49)
Riley (52)
Alexis or Alexa (74/60)
Rachel (62)
Avery (71)
Kenzie (81)
Kenna or Makenna (none)

B agreed that if I made the first step to make such a list, that would be the list we would work with. I made this list and sent an email to B. It said, "your children's names are on this list somewhere. Please remove your least favorite name from each list and send back to me." I didn't know if I could finally intrigue him enough to pick names, but the process was just what he needed...a couple of minutes later I got an email back that he had taken a couple of names from. Gleeful that I had found a way to engage him, I removed 2 more names and sent it back to him. Couple of minutes later, he removed 2 more names. We continued the back and forth. Through this process we got down to the following:

Boys :

Ethan
Connor
Aaron
Tristan
Nathan
Carson

Girls:

Ava
Ella
Sarah
Kenna

I have to say something about Kenna. When we did our first IVF, naively thinking it might actually work, we went to lunch at the beach to have fun talking about names. At some point we came up with the name Kenna and both felt it was perfect. In the course of the last 2 years, whenever we would refer to our future possible child, it was always by the name of Kenna. Kenna has felt like a part of our lives for much longer than before we knew we were pregnant. I just always assumed if we had a girl she would be Kenna. The problem with the name is that it is unusual and people always have weird/uncomfortable reactions to it (when we have mentioned it) - friends, family, everyone. That said, it was a given that it was on the table since it had been with us so long. At the end of the list I provided B with "suggested pairings" (yes, like wine and cheese) that I thought worked well together:

Connor/Carson and Kenna
Ethan and Ella
Nathan and Sarah

I have to say that Nathan is one of the few "classic" boys names that I have always loved, so it seemed to fit nicely on the list. It seemed like it should go with a nice classic girl's name so I wrote out "Nathan and Sarah". For some reason, they instantly sounded right. I've never thought twice about the name Sarah in my life. If you had asked me to think about it I would have said it's a pretty name but it never stood out to me. The fact that it struck me when going through the top 1000 names is really interesting in retrospect...but even more interesting that it made it to our mutual top 4 girls' names. Nathan and Sarah just sounded like they belonged to our family.

The more we talked about various name pairs for the twins, the more we realized that although we love a lot of modern names, we don't picture US with kids having those names. We just don't seem like a family that would have unusual names. And then the most unexpected decision came. After a legacy of unusual name creations like Katridiana Narisia, we are going to name our children.......Nathan and Sara.

After deciding on the names once and for all I was really excited...then I felt sad about losing Kenna. So after further discussion, this has been solved and all now seems right in the world...the full names of our children will be:

Nathanael Bryan (B's name is Bryan)
Sara Makenna (Makenna sounds better than Kenna with Sara)

Now I can go buy those cute wooden letters to hang in the nursery. :)