Baby Name Blog Post

Of course I had to buy this for my soon-to-be-formerly-unborn child.

It has her name on it. (Also, it was on sale for like three bucks at Babies R Us.) Baby clothes with amusing slogans on them are a recent trend I can definitely get behind. I think our baby needs this, given the history of our relationship. Also, one of my seminary students gave us this and it cracks me up. (Check out their website, it's rad!)

But anyway, the point of what I was going to write about today is what we are naming our baby. As nice as 'Cutie Pie' is, we thought she should have a real, actual name that won't look silly on her drivers license or if she (heaven forbid) decides to go to law school or something. Matt and I have this whole series of complex rules when it comes to naming our children, and while we had a perfectly acceptable boy's name agreed on (George, based on both a documentary I watched about George Washington while I was pregnant with Porter, and a lame joke Matt told me once) we were sort of at a loss as to what to name her if she turned out to be a girl. Betsy was convinced that we were going to have "a girl baby named Sarah" and while she was right on with the gender, no offense to anyone named Sarah, that wasn't one of the names we were considering.

So anyway, back in November I was driving around thinking about baby names, and it hit me like a ton of bricks: Amy Louise. (I can even remember the exact intersection I was at when I had that little epiphany.) I've liked the name Amy for a long time but it was never really a frontrunner, but from that point on, I was never able to think of her as being named anything else. The funny thing was, this was a few weeks before the ultrasound, so it was by no means certain that we were having a girl. (Up until then I was kind of betting on XY. I usually guess my kids' genders wrong, anyway.) So, I told Matt that we could call her something else, but her name is Amy Louise.

A couple of reasons why I like the name. (I told you, we really have a lot of specifications when it comes to this kind of thing. I really can't understand the parents who are like, 'Oh, we'll just wait to see what he/she looks like and then come up with a name!') It works for us because:

1. We like old-fashioned names. Amy is one of the sisters in Little Women. In fact, she's the one who ends up married to Christian Bale, I mean Laurie, so you could argue she has the best outcome of any of the girls.

2. It can't be too popular. A big part of the reason Betsy didn't get named Elizabeth is that Elizabeth was in the top ten in 2002. Seriously, we've discarded names so that our kid won't be one of three or four Michaels or Jennifers in his/her kindergarten class. According to the man, Amy peaked in popularity in the mid-70s (because of Amy Carter, maybe?) and has been on the decline ever since, now residing safely out of the top 100. Yes, I researched this.

3. It must be easy to spell and pronounce. You'll notice that we are going with the traditional spelling and not Aighme'E, or AEmyie, or anything like that. Life is too short to be called the wrong thing all the time. (My favorite are when the moms then go on message boards and complain that no one knows how to spell their kid's name. Well, duh!) Plus, cutesy spellings make me B'Arphe.

So, there you have it. Betsy Alice, Porter Robert, and now Amy Louise. We're nothing if not WASPy. I mean, don't those just sound like blond-haired, blue-eyed names? Which is why I haven't worried too much about whether or not she will look like her name. I think I am entirely capable of giving birth to an Amy (and I am confident in saying that even though she wouldn't move her &%#$ arm off her face during the ultrasound).

And failing that, we can always call her Cutie Pie until she's 18 and moves out and never speaks to us again.

On a completely unrelated note, I just heard a song whose lyrics are based entirely on the movie 'The Princess Bride'... if you can possibly conceive of such a thing.