Naming Dilemma

Many of you have asked about names for this baby . . . . and the truth is, we don't have a name for him yet. But, even if we did, we intend to keep the name quiet until after he is born. Truthfully - well, we don't want any opinions on whatever name we decide. We have discovered that prior to birth, people feel quite free to tell you what they think of the name you have selected, and then they start to lobby to convince you to change the name. After the baby is born, even if they hate the name, the worst that most people will say to your face is "how unusual!" We're okay with that, and sufficiently superstitious that if we actually pick a name, we'll be keeping quiet.

Now, in all of our attempts to come up with a name for this baby, we have identified a number of "joke" names for the baby. We've been far more successful at agreeing to these names than real names, so we have focused our efforts here. In the spirit of full disclosure, I thought I would share our 4 favorite "joke" names with you:

Name #1: Our first name for the baby is PGeorge. And no, the P is not a typo. First, we thought of "George" because of the looney toons cartoon (spoofing Of Mice and Men) where the abominable snowman is chasing bugs and hugging him to death while he desperately tries to escape and saying "I will love you, and hug you, and kiss you, and squeeze you and call you George." DH and I have been obsessed with that line since his 3 year old nephew came to stay with us a few years ago and spent the entire weekend chasing my dog around and hugging her to death, and she had the exact same expression on her face as bugs in that cartoon. So, we just kind of imagine all the little nieces and nephews (and aunts, uncles, grandparents, and us) doing that to this baby, too. We added a "leading silent P" because both of my nieces have names that begin with P, and we didn't want him to feel left out.

Name #2: Giodie (pronounced Jodi or Jody). DH has 2 sisters-in-laws named Jodi/Jody (one spelled Jody, and the other Jodi). They both have the same last name as this baby, and we joked that we didn't think there were enough Jodis in our family, and since Jody can be a boy's name . . . well, you get the drift. So then we started to think how we would differentiate this baby (the family calls the others Jody "y" and Jodi "i" when we talk about them), so we were thinking Giodie "G" would be funny. And the "ie" on the end . . .well, we wanted to be different - we don't have a Jodie either, yet.

Name #3: In light of the American financial crisis, one of DH's friends was discussing the fact that China owns most of our national debt, and one day, China will call it in and the US will become part of China. The friend suggested that in order to ease the transition for our child, we should have a Chinese name for our son . . . so we decided on Ming-Ha. There is another joke in there that relates to our religion . . . the Chinese name Ming-Ha sounds a lot like an americanized version of the Hebrew word for afternoon prayer service (Mincha), so we joked that could be his Hebrew name. We also joked that his Hebrew middle name could be the word for the prayer service that closes out the Sabbath (Havdallah).

Name #4: Last week, we were watching some cooking thing on PBS, and Gwyneth Paltrow was on it and needed to go feed her daughter, Apple. I started laughing hysterically (don't know why it was SUDDENLY funny to me) and I told him that if Gwyneth can name her child after fruit, perhaps we should name the baby Melon. We had a long debate about types of melon, and different kinds of pears, and other silly types of fruit names, but I decided I liked Melon - Mel for short. DH then told me it looks like I swallowed a melon, so it was very appropriate.

Hope you enjoyed our name discussion!