Nerd alert: Every time I think about names for our kids, this song from Children of Eden pops into my head.  It’s not even a good song. You can take the nerd out of theatre, but you can’t take theatre out of the nerd I guess.

Anyway, on Saturday night I was at a bachelorette party for one of my friends.  I was one of four girls named Jessica in attendance. FOUR. My husband also has a very common name, so we are both driven to give our children names that won’t get them confused with a half a dozen other kids in their class.  I spent eight years of my life being “Jess S” and having several friends who were “Sarah A” and “Jenny B” (luckily a variety nicknames developed by the time I hit high school).  I don’t want that same fate for my kids. I found it annoying, and it’s always so awkward to say your own name out loud to someone else with the same name.

So we go unique.  We try to steer clear of weird, but I can’t deny that many people might find Cormac to be weird so maybe we succeed in our mission, maybe we don’t. But we try to find names that will suit our children and won’t make them feel like a carbon copy of every other kid in their classrooms.  Sorry if that means they won’t find a key chain with their name down in Disney World (and for what it’s worth, the Jessica key chains were always sold out anyway).

All that being said, we have gotten nowhere with names this time.  Naming Baby #2 is virtually our only job this time around.  There’s no nursery to prep (he’ll be sharing a room with Mac), no showers to register for, no clothes to buy and wash (he’ll be wearing all of Mac’s hand-me-downs), no classes to take — seriously, our only job is to figure out a name for this kid.  And we’re no closer to finding a name than we were 26 weeks ago.

Neither The Husband nor I are the type of person to have the one favorite name that we settle on right away.  We want to have a few in the lineup.  The concept of naming a baby before I even meet him or her feels weird to me. I need to know him before I name him.  That isn’t a judgment on people who do pick a name — in fact, most people I know settle on one name. I recognize that we’re the weird and high-maintenance ones. But it just feels strange to me. That being said, we can’t seem to find even three names that we can agree on and we both LOVE. We’ve barely found one.

So basically, for all our high-falutin’ naming ideals, we clearly suck at this.

When naming Mac, we ended up coming up with a sweet sixteen bracket system to figure out what our final four names were going to be.  We went through literally every page of the baby name book, seeded the names we liked best, and slowly but surely eliminated the duds. I thought we’d be more experienced this time around, but I’m thinking we’re going to have to employ the same system.

Let the naming madness begin!