Occasionally I have a dream in which I suddenly have a new baby and realize I haven’t even THOUGHT about names yet. This is similar to the dream in which you suddenly need to take a final exam and realize you haven’t attended class all semester: it’s an “Oh no, I didn’t prepare!” dream. Except that when I wake up from an exam\/class dream, I don’t feel the urge to start studying the subject of that dream class, whereas when I wake up from a baby\/name dream, I DO.<\/p>\n
And so this morning I am wondering: If you suddenly had a new baby, what would you name it? If it’s too stressful to imagine needing to choosing THE ACTUAL NAME, RIGHT NOW, then feel free to play the game in whatever way would be fun rather than stressful (I don’t think any of us need any more stress right now). You can, for example, list a few finalist boy names and a few finalist girl names that come to mind, without choosing the actual winning names. Or you could say where you’d START: like, would you start by browsing a particular section of The Baby Name Wizard<\/a>? Or you could say some of the general things you’d be looking for, like that you’d want to use a family\/honor name this time, or WOULDN’T want a family\/honor name this time. If it doesn’t feel fun to work on the first names but does feel fun to think about the middle names, that is a perfectly fine way to answer the question. And you can choose to answer either what you would choose if it were entirely up to you, or what you think you’d choose with another parent.<\/p>\n When I tried to answer the question myself, I realized I must have switched out of the mode of casually working on my mental lists of favorite baby names, which I used to do pretty often while folding laundry or doing some other chore that didn’t need much mental attention. I still have pretty much the same names as I did 10 years ago when I thought we might have one more child after Henry. My boy-name list, especially, has remained where it was, probably because I have never found boy names as fun to think about (or as stressful to choose) as girl names. My girl-name list has shifted a little, but it’s basically the same list as before but with the names shifted around: some old favorites shifted down, some other old favorites shifted up. I would still want to use a family\/honor name as a middle name, if possible.<\/p>\n How about you? What sorts of things would you be thinking about if you suddenly and unexpectedly needed to name a new baby?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Occasionally I have a dream in which I suddenly have a new baby and realize I haven’t even THOUGHT about names yet. This is similar to the dream in which you suddenly need to take a final exam and realize you haven’t attended class all semester: it’s an “Oh no, I didn’t prepare!” dream. Except […]<\/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-14881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-3S1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14881","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=14881"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14886,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14881\/revisions\/14886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}