The Name Game

I recently saw a site for the “Top 100 Baby Names” of 2010 and two of my daughters are on the list. I felt a tug of annoyance at this since I have had some misplaced pride over finding unique names for my kids and bucking the trends. But I got over it pretty quickly as my eye was caught by another link: the “Top 100 Pet Names” of 2010. And what I saw surprised me. In the past couple of years a strange phenomenon has been occurring: the baby name list and the pet name list have been growing more comparable until now the top names are just a few places off from list to list. Since people have not become more likely to name their children Fluffy and Spot, that can only mean pet owners are more likely to name their animals people names. It makes sense--people are delaying parenthood more than in the past and the place is now filled with pooches and kitties. And everything that goes with that. There are pet pictures with Santa that then make it to the family Christmas card. People have Facebook pages for their four-legged kids. Many people refer to the pets of their grown children as their “grandpets.” Mother’s Day greetings now include women with “furry children.” And so on. In Judi Barrett’s Animals Should Definitely Not Wear Clothing, there are a lot of ways animals are not like people. But I know a lot of people who disagree.

http://www.amazon.com/Animals-Should-Definitely-Wear-Clothing/dp/0689708076

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judi_Barrett

Letter Rip

Choosing a child’s name is a daunting and overwhelming process. The responsibility of deciding what another person will be called forever is huge. When they brought me Keilana’s birth certificate application for my signature, I had my first parental anxiety attack. What if I was making a terrible decision? What if she hated it and needed therapy to get over it? What if it didn’t match her or her personality? And so on. It took me hours to put pen to paper and the nurse got pretty exasperated. When we found out Connor was a boy, “Kiefer” was the name we chose. But I had a dream that it wasn’t the right name--although the dream-giver wasn’t kind enough to let me know what the right name was. So, after much debate, we chose “Connor,” but it took me two years to really settle into it. Nicknames have to be considered, as well. I’m sure my parents didn’t think of the problems created by naming me something that rhymes with “coyote,” but grade-schoolers were all over it. And you have to worry about initials, too. No parent wants to saddle their kid with heinous initials, but finding something that works is a challenge. We wanted Addison’s middle name to be “Shea,” because it is a family name. However, if you have a last name that starts with “S,” Addison Shea is not going to work, right? I thought of this when I read Martha Alexander’s A, You’re Adorable. Letters are hard-core.

http://www.amazon.com/Youre-Adorable-Martha-Alexander/dp/0439071577

http://loganberrybooks.com/most-alexander.html