The Name Game, Redux

A few disjointed stories about our journey to pick a name for baby C.

We (by "we" I mean "I") definitely won't commit to a name until we meet this baby face-to-face.  Seeing her Elsie made it so crystal clear.  As soon as we laid eyes on her she was Elsie, and had always been Elsie.  It took a good while, on the order of hours, before Hub and I got the quiet and the privacy to discuss it, but we had reached the same conclusion independently, making it all the better.  So Elsie she is.

And yet we pour over baby name lists and chitchat about it constantly.  Favorites change with the day, the week, and the weather.  Short lists get long, then get hacked back down again.  In some ways it's more limited this time (it has to go with "Elsie" without being too matchy-match).  In other ways it is still wide open because there are so very many names to choose from, and so many great ones.

As always, we are open to suggestions, so send them along, both sincere and hilarious.

***

Hub has a tactic this time.  He wants to catch a name on the very front end of its popularity.  He wants to be ahead of the curve.  To achieve this, he focuses on lists from a century ago, centering his search around 1912.  When he finds some names he likes, it's off to Wolfram Alpha to see the stats on those names over time.  This is how an engineer goes about naming his daughter.  Deliberately.  Statistically.  It's a data-driven, methodical process.

I'm just pleased he's finally come around to old-lady names!  They've always been favorites of mine.

***

Elsie, who has never quite got the hang of naming, (stuffed animals are called: Doggie, Rabbit, Koala, Hippopotamus, etc.) has finally decided to recommend a few names of her own.  She favors flower names, and knows a lot of them as perennial and seed catalogs have become some of the favorite household reading material.  Last night, Elsie's name list went like this:

Aster
Lilac
Iris
Placenta

In that order.  She has since dropped Placenta for Datura, an exotic name for an exotic flower.  I'm just impressed she remembers the word placenta.  I must have taught it to her months ago, while looking through A Child is Born.  I remember she fixated on the umbilical chord, and I must have told her about placentas then.  Placentas and belly buttons.

***

There is a name in my family that I've not heard anywhere else.  It's Lucia, but not pronounced Loo-see-ah, the way it so often is, pronounced Loo-sha instead.  It's my great aunt's name, my grandma's sister.  I like it.  I really like it.  I wanted to put it on the list.

"We can't use Lucia."  Hub said, matter-of-factly.  "It's against the rules.  No living relative."

We don't play by many name rules in this house, but this is one of them. No living relatives.  It's a Jewish rule, and we are not Jewish, but it makes some kind of sense to us.


"She's not a CLOSE relative.  And Lucia's such a nice lady!  Besides, she's in her 90s, and she broke her hip a few months back.  How much longer could she live?"  I implored.  "I'm sure she'd be honored!"

No dice.  Rules are rules.

Three days later, Aunt Lucia died.

It's okay!  It's okay!  You can laugh!  It is permitted. Lucia lived an awesome life with three wonderful daughters.  She was one of those epic and inspiring teachers who touched hundreds and hundreds of lives.  She saw many great grandchildren, all of them healthy and adorable.  Then she died peacefully in her sleep at a very old age, with her sister, my grandmother spending the night for a sleepover.  She suffered and declined almost not at all.  She is already very missed, but the loss is ours, not hers.  Everyone should be as lucky as Lucia.

"You know what this means."  I told Hub with a sidelong glance. 

"Too soon!  Too soon!"  He said.

"Yeah, people will think you're trying to reincarnate her" my brother added.

Tough cookies, the name is on the list!