Baby Names

People are beginning to ask if we have thought about baby names.  I don’t really think that we have in any serious fashion.  On babycenter (which I am convinced is some forum for unwed teen mothers who believe in the lower case and emoticons) some people have named their kids months and months before they are due.  Is it me or is that weird?  I am a bit more of the mind of culling a short list, seeing what the kid looks like, and choosing from the list.  Sage advice from Matt’s cousin Tracie was to decide a name and then TELL NO ONE.  I am on board with this, as I do not need the peanut gallery (though I love you, peanut gallery) to be blasting my already low confidence in being a mother and choosing an appropriate name.  Speaking of which, I suppose you cannot get any less appropriate than… HO.  I mean seriously.  Who names their child that?  I have tried to explain the whole ‘it means a prostitute’ thing to my parents off and on for years and frankly, they just don’t care.  I get it, my granddad named me and he was HA, but come ON, that would be like naming your daughter ‘Chicken’ in Cantonese.  If growing up with HO as my name in the not hyper-educated South is some sort of rite of passage, I think I have already lived my life ten times over. 

So, back to the names.  I have been looking on the internet for popular baby names and nothing has really stuck.  I looked for some Korean names and none of those stuck either (plus, as yet another aside, none of our friends HAD Korean names except Min and I.  Everyone else Anglicized at some point, to a Julie, or Esther, or Catherine or what not).  Matt is looking for names a less conventional way – through the closing credits of TV shows and movies.  The whole process is interesting to me – I find it far easier to discount names based on the flaky and wenchy people that have gone into and out of my life.  So I have a list of names that I will NOT name Kumquat and also serves as a lifelong history of people who have wronged me since age 6!  Not that I am keeping score, exactly.

Despite all of the convoluted process we have a few names in reserve, but of course we won’t say.