Our current difficult project is naming BB so we don’t have to call him BB anymore. Before we got pregnant, we had a boy name and girl name picked out. Afterward, we decided, “just for fun”, to toss around some other names to see if we liked anything better. We subsequently rejected the boy name, found out BB is a boy, and now are wandering through tens of thousands of names in search of the perfect one. The Social Security Administration maintains a cool website that lists the most popular names of each year and decade for the entire country. BabyNames.com lets us maintain a list of names, in which we periodically add and delete possibilities. Another great site, BabyNamesWorld.com, lets people who already have a particular name tell you what they think about it and any problems the name has caused them. Between the two of us, we have several criteria:

1. He only has three names (i.e. only one middle name).
2. He is not Andy III.
3. He goes by his first name rather than his middle name.
4. His name isn’t among the most common names, defined as maybe the top 10-15 in popularity.
5. He doesn’t share his name with anyone whom we really dislike.
6. His name and initials don’t lend themselves to easy ridicule by mean kids.
7. His name is definitely masculine rather than ambiguous.

There are probably others, but those are the main ones. I lean more toward “normal” names and Jenny more toward unusual names so he won’t share his name with any other boys in his class. We hope to find something we both like very soon.