I dreamed last night that I was in the hospital, in labor, with a baby I hadn’t realized I was going to have. Of course my mind skipped right over all the other details (how did this happen? do we have a car seat? why is this hospital room so enormous and luxurious?) and went directly to “What will we NAME the baby?” In real life, I’d call someone to bring me a baby name book and a notepad; in the dream, I had to come up with names off the top of my head.<\/p>\n
For boys, the names that first came to mind: Oliver, Henry, George, Charlie. (Henry is the pseudonym of my fifth child; it was very close to being his name, and I’d be glad for another chance to use it.)<\/p>\n
For girls, the names that first came to mind: Genevieve, Penelope, Annabel, Clarissa.<\/p>\n
What are the first names that come to your mind, if you imagine needing to name a baby on short notice? No consulting lists or baby name books! Just write down the ones you would think of if you were alone in your hospital room. (I didn’t cheat, and you can see in the comments section how repeatedly sorry I was.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I dreamed last night that I was in the hospital, in labor, with a baby I hadn’t realized I was going to have. Of course my mind skipped right over all the other details (how did this happen? do we have a car seat? why is this hospital room so enormous and luxurious?) and went […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-33t","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11747"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11753,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11747\/revisions\/11753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}